Yesterday lunchtime I sat looking out of the office window wondering what to create and decided the tree was a bit too far away to work with. I was able to get a photo though, enlarged it a bit today and then made a sketch of a small area of it to paint.
The tree is a sycamore and only has a few leaves left hanging, mostly dead ones. It also has lots of sycamore nuts which are very attractive, like little baubles. It was actually quite a nice day but I decided to try a grey background to make it look colder – however, the Ultramarine blue has separated a bit while the wash was drying so it’s looking more like a hazy day than a grey one. I’m sure it will do just as well :-).
Before scanning I started to take off all the masking but then realised that you might not be able to see the shapes very easily as the background is so light, so I left the top left corner as an example. In fact the sky is light enough that I probably didn’t need to mask at all, which would have saved me ages… it was really fiddly.