Southern Catalpa Trees at Chatham, Watercolor

Almost finished with this painting of Chatham Manor's Southern Catalpa trees. These trees are located on the north side of Chatham in Stafford County. The mansion was used as a hospital during the Civil War. Walt Whitman described the scene at the hospital for "worst case soldiers". The trees at this time were 25 years old and are located just outside the north window of the mansion. Sparing the details of Whitman's description, I will just say that my interpretation of the trees was greatly influenced by the images of that description. I couldn't help but see the ghostly, skeleton images in the trees and couldn't escape the feeling of a cyclic organic growth. The wholes in the trees: most likely precisely cut to have access to the metal poles inside that support the weight of the foliage of these hollow trunk trees.

Painting Foliage, Demonstration 3

Southern Catalpa trees at Chatham in Stafford County. More about these trees later.
For this step, I have begun to push and pull foliage shapes in the tree and continued to work the shadow shapes of the tree trunk. I try to work with the shapes that have evolved during the underpainting, versus the reference I am using. When painting the trunks, I vary the warm and cool shadow shapes. I will continue to work through the midrange values in the grass and walkway. The masking will be removed after this step.

This painting of a paperbark tree was done using a similar "sponge" texture technique.

Painting Foliage, Demonstration 2

I have worked in the yellows of the trunk, began developing the grassy foreground areas and the shadow in the walkway.

Painting Foliage, Demonstration 1

Above are demonstrations from today's workshops, painting foliage. First we began by practicing a few thumbnail value and composition sketches. These will be used later in the session as we work through the paintings. After the images are sketched on watercolor paper we began creating the underpainting. The paper is dampened with a spray bottle. Then using a sea sponge, I applied paint starting with cool yellows, moving to warm yellows, Quin. red, and cobalt blue. I tilted the paper, pushed paint with the pump spray, splattered, and moved paint with a Viva to allow the paint to mix and mingle on paper. Areas that will be "forward" foliage are left lighter with more yellows, "behind" areas with more blues. I began painting in the light yellow to red tones in the tree trunks and glazed in some foreground.