Empty table, Somerled Av., NDG

I couldn't resist making one more post today because it brings my 2020 total to 52 posts, the same number of blogs I had from all of last year! The painting, done earlier in the week, shows a bright green metallic park bench and some large tree trunks, with a view of Somerled avenue in the background. Part of a car is visible just on the middle right. I planned to have more parked cars in the picture but the perspective was way off and I just painted over the outlines. Once again I found a nice, out-of-the way place to sit, and people still had to find an excuse to get 2 meters near me to sneak a peek. I guess I'm not the only one with the pandemic blues.

Depicting the colour of tree bark is remarkably difficult. If you ask anyone, they would say that a tree is brown, but really, tree barks are brown, purple, blue, grey, green... etc. The foreground coniferous tree was orange/brown, while the deciduous tree by the table was more purple-grey/brown with a green mossy tinge. I tried to use the neutralizing complements (red and green = brown) but it was not heavy enough, so I added some burnt sienna and indo blue. The scanned painting looks okay here but the original seems a little over worked and muddy. I practiced a few variations back at home, so next time I paint tree bark I will try out something different and see how it works.

5 x 7 " rough press, watercolour, April 2020

(last piece of rough press paper from the watercolour block by Fabriano)