Watercoloring a simple tree

 I am laughing out loud at the title of this post. This week we are giving this tree created with a fan brush a whirl for the watercoloring challenge and this was suggested by Janine this week as a guest host. You can see the short ( 1 minute ) Video on Facebook here. by Matthew Palmer. If you go to his YouTube channel and click on the shorts, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to find it. But the title is 60 second lesson A Summer Tree. 

So, I thought no problem ( he makes it look very easy) and I started looking at my brushes. I was pretty sure I owned a fan brush and the first thing I found was this. ( a fan Wisp brush) 

So I thought lets see what happens. 

 

Too much white space so, I took all the brushes out of the jar and found this smaller even shorter brush.

My thought was the bristles were just too short. so, I thought OK Micheals is open go see if they have any brushes on the shelf. ( its a hit and miss store, and its the only craft store that is in this town now, the next closest ones are 80 miles west of here) 

 

So ,these were the only fan brushes they had. and they claim to be the same size made by the same company but the one on the left looked like it had more bristles to me. and they were doing a buy one get one half off sale so I thought what the heck and brought them both home. ( these are also listed in their store as Acrylic brushes not watercolor ones but, they did not seem too stiff so I thought OK they should work) 

 Okay so at this point the length of the bristles does not seem to matter much and now I am thinking maybe this needs a lot less water like paint more straight out of the tube consistency? Not really sure but that is the game plan for the next thing to try. 

 And then I had an AH-Ha moment... I tried doing the brush in a flat-ish perpendicular (horizontal) to the paper type angle and kept the bristles at the top of the page and the bottom of the brush towards me and then drug / waved the brush down the page towards me. If you normally paint with a round brush and the handle is up in the air, that is what I was doing with these brushes. So the angle is important here. 

 So with that figured out, I decided it was time to switch to some Arches cold press paper and try a whole tree. 

 And I did use the small brush I owned before this all started and that worked. 

So I added a little more darker green to it because, the colors were a little too close to each other I guess to really see the different shades. And I wanted some shadow sections.

I then let this sit for two days trying to figure out what to do with it. I was just so excited by the time I finished getting the hand/brush/paint to work I just picked it up and set it down a lot.

 So far I have left off the sentiment as I am not sure what I want to do with this and I have mounted it simply to a premade 49& market card base. Its A2 in real life. If you'd like to play along with us you can find this challenge here at SCS. Thanks for stopping by.