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Shelly’s Trees
Shelly is a good friend who just happens to like photography and takes some very good pictures. A recent picture, Shelly’s Trees, provided the inspiration for two quick sketches, one on paper and one on canvasboard. Both small.
Sunset Tree, shows the three trees silhouetted against the sunset, with the sky showing through and some branches lit by the setting sun. The actual photograph was taken during the day; no sunset.
Another experiment using the same tree(s). I wanted to get away from everything being so horizontal. But I loved the colorful sky showing through the branches.
Sometime in the future, I may try a much bigger version of Shelly’s Tree.
It’s way too long
I don’t know what I was thinking, but sometime last year during the worst of the pandemic, I bought five 10×20 gessoed canvases online. Not only did I not need so many gessoed canvases (I had been painting on raw canvas and preferred that), but 10×20 was way too long. So it’s taken me a year to figure out what to do with what I’d bought.
Actually, it took a friend sending me a picture of a sunset he had taken in Chatham, MA.
It was a looong photo … and I finally knew what I could do with at least one of those long canvases. There was enough of a diagonal, that I didn’t mind the long straight-across horizon line. I took out a lot of the details in the foreground and enlarged the tree several times. I picked up the sky sunset colors in the middleground, even though it was more blue in the photo.
10×20 is still too long, and I have four left to go.
Ruth Hurd | BLOG 