Another adventure into the snowy, cold back garden! I sketched this scene on January 17, 2023 then worked on the painting in February. I seem to be drawn to this Hawthorn tree and wall, it’s the same one I sketched last year in March on a rainy cold morning. I just love old Hawthorn trees because they usually twist and twine together and bend and grow shaped by prevailing winds.
Another thing I love in winter is the dry grasses; the color of it and how it lays in clumps, it’s strands making such interesting forms. I like looking at them to see where voles and mice have made entrance holes to hideaways. The other thing I love about this wall is all the moss of course! It’s a fun challenge to paint and I will be doing a lot more paintings and studies of it.
I used my very small sketchbook and drew the sketch above using a permanent ink pen. I did this from life, standing right in front of the tree and wall as you see in the previous photo. I did have my big mittens on with the flip back top so I could use my fingers, but it’s still a challenge to draw!
The picture above shows what I did next. I took the small original drawing (bottom right) and scanned it. Then I printed it out on plain computer paper, and looking at the photo I took, I drew darker lines on the printed paper and used white out to block lines that I didn’t want, like where I drew lines through a branch etc. Then I scanned that large one I edited and printed it again but at the size I wanted, a bit smaller.
Above it shows my light table, I put the scanned edited drawing on the light table and taped my watercolor paper on top. Then with the light on (of course) I traced with light lines using a pencil. Now it’s ready to use for painting! I like doing this because it’s always from my original sketch, not traced ever from a photo! A sketch/drawing will always have more character, not a perfect copy but maybe unnecessary details left out and others enhanced.
I decided to do this painting in gouache, as it’s my new medium and I love exploring it’s properties. I decided to use a thin base color of purply violet, I started light then darker layers to define the shaded areas.
This is a shot of my palette where I’m mixing my colors. I made it from the plastic cover of a notebook that I cut off and taped it onto mat or mount board. I have a travel palette that keeps the paint wet and soft just above this. I take a bit of wet gouache out and put it in little blobs on the mixing palette as I work, this keeps my travel palette cleaner. I especially do this with the white to keep it clean. As these little blobs dry out, I just rewet them as needed.
Above I mixed up some brownish purple color for the ground and wall dark areas in a little plastic dish. As I painted I used the waterbrush to blend out the edges to keep it soft, this is a technique I use in watercolors too.
Here you can see I started to put the background tree in and some of the distant wall. The thing is, I really was on the fence as to if I would put any background in at all! I can picture this tree and wall with just a white background, but it’s the landscape painter in me that wants to just put the whole scene in! Maybe someday I’ll repaint it with no background and see how it looks.
I added some sky and grass colors in the field behind.
Here I started to add the greens of the moss and bark on the Hawthorn.
Finally I start to add the greens of the moss on the rocks, trying to be careful and not painting areas of rocks with no moss.
And here I put more color onto the big Ash tree in the background, but try to keep it light. The lighting on my painting is terrible but I think I was painting at night time and this is using my cell phone.
Oh boy, look how crowded it looks on my table! This is working at a plastic 2’x4′ folding table in the living room, because that’s where the WOODSTOVE is!! haha. You can see my mixing palette and the paint container palette just above it, with my water just above that in a ceramic container. In the middle is the painting clipped onto my work board and above that is the printed out drawing I did. On the left is a photo reference for details and a bit for the color, and above that can you see the little study I did in my blog post “Stone Wall Studies in Gouache”. That is a great reference for color, moss and stones that I can refer to anytime.
I really liked how my painting was looking now, it’s really come to life for me, but a Hawthorn isn’t a Hawthorn without it’s berries! The tree had lots of dried out berries of deep red, just waiting for hungry Blackbirds or greedy Fieldfares! So I used an old trick by touching the end of my brush to paint on my mixing palette then made the round mark one at a time. I practiced on scrap paper first to see what color and thickness of paint I should use.
And here it is finished finally! I didn’t talk about putting the grass in front of the tree but that is an important part. As shown earlier, I put dark colors down first then this allowed me to use very light gouache on top to make grass strokes. It’s fun to arrange them so they look natural and they give a lot of movement to a drawing or painting. Then I added the dead leaves on the ground too.
I know I did this weeks ago when the snow was still flying, but today (April 2) I’m posting it after being outside in a sunny garden! We thought the sun would never shine again, it’s been so cloudy and grey! Soon we’ll be planting veg and flowers in the gardens and watching all the bees and insects come. I’d like to do some insect and wild flower studies and paintings, so we’ll see what comes this spring and summer!
(You can also follow me on Instagram as “mary_mcandrew_artist” and Facebook as “Mary McAndrew Painting and Illustration”, both of these I share more up to date progress of things I’m working on.)