There was a tree that caught my attention over spring break. It sort of looked like it was surprised or scared. So I am painting it with a waterfall/mountainous background in oil.

This was the initial drawing.

At first I thought I’d just do the tree, but there were a lot of other really cool images from our time in the mountains that I wasn’t sure how I’d find a way to use. The big rock that the main tree obscures slightly on the right was a huge rock in the shape of a heart where we ate lunch one day next to a mountain stream. There were a lot of water falls, none of them very big, so this one is just an invented one.

I began blocking it in this morning as well to try and get as much of the white of the canvas covered up so that I can get in there and start defining the lights and darks when I get back to it.

I’ve been less and less happy with my environmental design lately, and I think focusing on some paintings and drawings like this will just serve to make the figures I paint and draw in the future stronger. I do like the outdoors and trying to do more paintings from nature will give me an excuse to get outside with my easel and paint some things as I see them. The winter forced me to do a lot of inventing and painting from photos (this painting is from photo reference, so I am not saying I’ll get away from it completely). So I hope that as this year progresses, I’ll continue to make improvements in my visual library so that when winter shows up again, I can invent better than I did this past year.