Jacaranda Tree
Kula, Maui, Hawaii
15x22, acrylic on panelMay 20, 2002, I'm 62, happy birthday.
Painting on Location
This is two hours from the start. Using a 3/4" sable filbert. I wet the whole support and washed in the sky. While the sky was drying I captured the grass, I went with the big areas blocking in the foliage, big branches background trees and the road. I see the tree as having a foreground, middle ground including the trunk and branches and inside background. To get ready for tomorrow I cleaned up the posts with two coats of white. |
Day 2, What a great day. A dreams come true kind of day. This
morning I set up my solar power to run my computer with an inverter.
Hee hee, happy camper. By 12:00 I was on location setting up. On and off all day I had to laugh, the sun was shining, the wind was blowing and it was raining. My umbrella was set so low I had a two foot space to see my view.
 I'm up in the clouds tonight, 4,600 feet, Chillier ... It's
great, country radio on the van's radio, the computer on the extra battery. Alone at the top of the world. I'm a hermit at heart. Speaking about hearts, I'm staying beside an image in our mountain,
The Jacaranda painting coming along well, not quite 100% coverage yet, but no hurry. Every day more blue flowers bloom! |
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Set up your easel and be sure your support is level. Move your eyes when you look at different areas of the view, not your whole head. It's best to look with one eye only. Follow one concentric ring across the (support, panel, canvas). This and visually marking the left and right sides of the image should give you your final painting image width. If your painting for more then one day on location, mark everything about your easels position.
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I've given up on trying to catch the sun so I'm spreading the cool around with a glaze of Cyan.. I considered it 100% covered by 3:00.
I would say there are 30% more flowers today. Soon the petals will blow on the hi-way, I'll have to be here at 6:00 in the morning to catch that. The day after tomorrow I hope. 4:48 finished for the day, ten to five, I thought I was out of that rut.. It was a perfect day, and it just happened to be my 61st birthday!  After such a great day I left for the higher levels, the 7,000 foot level of Hosmer's Grove. Now were in the cold. I think I'll stay here a day and give the flowers another bloomin' chance. See the inside of the creator and another small painting. |
| Day 4,
6:30, on the paintings location. There are petals on the road and more flowers on the tree. It's perfect. Shortly it will warm up. A young kid on a road luge just whizzed by, it looked like he had a school backpack on. No breaks and going 35-40 mph, kids.. I've taken out the left post, my perception was wrong, when I got back to basics and looked at the whole painting and viewed it with one eye and applied paint with one eye, I saw I had missed on the foreshortening. Here it is with the white outs and the enlarging of the tree, pulling it more into foreground.
It's 10:57 and the sun has gone for the day. Perfect timing, I got
all my correction work done in the paintings with the 4:00 colors by using
the same colors that were already down. Now the colors are here and I can go forward.
The Geneva International Middle School bought my CD of the color course and likes it.
This is whiting out corrections, it will take two coats for a clean
start.
Using one eye to view the painting and the image, which are stacked over one another is key, the most important drawing factor. The other :) is to paint with two eyes open after you have mentally found your marks with one eye only :) It's been a great day, just the right amount of overcast.
There is as much character in a tree as on a face, and much more intricate. 3:00, I'm adding the little branches that make the larger branches
look real. A #3 script liner now that I have the patterns in place.
I'm looking for the details that make the character of this type of tree.
The petals are usually darker green underneath. that's because they are
pods of flowers, each pod sticking out from the green leaves. that always
casts a shadow in the sun and even in cloudy weather. the green leaves
are very small on a shaft like a feather.
The tree is 30% covered now, way up from when I started. The petals are bluer purple in the shade and redder in the sunlight. The leaves go from a purple-green split complementary to a yellow-green opposition to the purple. It's Great the way nature works that way. The colors remind me of the first transparent yellow Giotto's painted with. Arsenic, his green would have been an iron green. He couldn't use the copper sediment which would have been better and more transparent because lead turned copper black. If he had Egypt's tin white it would have been easier. We have come a long way since than as far as poison pigments and compatible colors are concerned but today we don't have a transparent yellow acrylic. It's that old Church-Ostwald Color Chart where manufactures match their colors to. We really do need an overhaul on how we use color pigments. Here is the day 5 image.
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Finished. Jacaranda Tree at the 2,000 Ft. Level
PREVIOUS PAINTING, Acrylic, Jo's House on Oahu
