[Whimsical Willow] on the Water

I just finished this painting today. It's sort of like a willow tree on the edge of a little green river with a forest on the opposite bank. I liked the pink accent color against the greens so I added some flowers.

We raided Ulduar last night, wiping for three hours while trying to kill Thorim on Hard Mode. This allowed for a lot of downtime so I set up my little easle in front of my second monitor and painted while raiding.


You can actually see the forest background better in this picture. I thought it looked awesome before I painted a tree on top of it, but I had to put some sort of object in the painting. It's actually really easy to paint trees like this. I start with a solid green background and let it dry. Then feather in some black around the edges on top, then mix some green and black and slop on some vertical lines like trees. Before it completely dries, add in lighter shades of green to create depth (highlights) to define individual tree trunks. I used a similar process when I did that purple Night Elf forest painting a while ago.

Painting [Cherry Blossoms]

I haven't had a lot of time to work on crafts over the last week but I did manage to do a little painting. I'm not sure that I am done with this one or not, but here's what it looks like so far! I feel like I need something on the top, but I'm not feeling inspired right now. Perhaps I will come back to it later. I like the color combination of aqua and red though.

Somewhat Abstract

So I had this huge tube of metallic silver paint and wondered how it would look as a background color. I slapped some on, then grabbed some eggplant color and it sort of grew organically from there. I love this color combination.

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.

Into the Woods of Teldrassil

The enchanting forest home of the Night Elves was the first area of Azeroth that I encountered when I began playing World of Warcraft.

This painting has been sitting on my easle for over a week now. Today I managed to finally add the last touches and get it to a finished state. I'm not completely happy with it but it was fun to paint on two different canvases and I think it at looks pretty good from a distance at least.

I painted this using acryllics on primed canvas with an in-game screenshot for reference.

Hug this [Tree]!

I painted this tree today based off of another Eyvind Earle piece. I love his whimsical style. This painting is on an 8x10 canvas, done in acryllic paints. I used water to help blend the colors in the background.

Playing with Colors

I painted a couple smaller 8x10 pictures to try out some different techniques and ideas. The smaller canvases are inexpensive and great for a beginner like myself. I could even paint over them and reuse the canvas later.

A [Tree on Canvas]

Michaels had some canvases on sale today so I decided to bust out the acryllics and try my first painting on canvas. Normally I just use my acryllics to paint little wood boxes, plastic blasters and Jedi comlinks, stuff like that. So for my first painting on canvas I decided to draw inspiration from one of my favorite artists, Eyvind Earle.

I started painting the background and just layered on the green then mixed in some black and came in from the edges with strokes to look like grass or vines.


After getting the background the way I wanted it and letting it dry, I found a picture of an Eyvind Earle painting online and basically tried to copy it without getting as detailed. His lines are too painstakingly perfect for my patience so I took a more impressionistic approach and focused more on getting the idea of the shadows and highlights conveyed. I like how it starts with a silhouette but adds the contrasting white highlights to give the tree some depth. A lot of amateur artists are doing the black tree silhouette-on-a-colored background thing right now. It's easy and can look great in a modern room. I will probably hang this painting in my bedroom.