Painting the Spring

I ran out of mounted canvases so this was painted using acryllics on canvas paper. Mary Blair's artwork served as inspiration (it was an easy transition from Eyvind Earle since both painted Disney animation concept art). I really like the combination of orange and aqua blue, so after starting with an aqua-colored background I decided that had to be sky, so why not have a blossoming orange tree? I also felt that the clouds in the sky were a little lonely without a few white doves frolicking in the breeze.

Tree in the [Grass]

I received a request from a friend to do a tree painting for her using the elements she liked from my previous tree paintings. So this is what I came up with based off of the following criteria she presented me with:

- whimsical like the Eyvind Earle trees
- mysterious (not obvious) background
- light-colored background but not too light
- "green is good"

Having learned a lesson from my last painting, I started this one by painting the background. I liked how subtle vertical stripes fading into the background color can look like trees in a fog, so I started with fat green vertical stripes blending into a yellow background and then painted over them with another layer of yellow.

Next, I added in the grass in several layers of shades of green but decided that the grass really should be the foreground, so after painting on the tree silhouette I repainted a lot more grass over the bottom of the tree. The nice thing about grass is you can keep adding on as many layers as you want and it keeps giving the illusion of more and more depth.