Flowering Pear

I began with this, a toned piece of masa paper.  You can learn how to prepare this toned paper, here.

I did a very limited drawing to define the perspective of the three pear trees and how the fence diminished into the background. I then painted my first washes of driveway and grassy area. I used several colors of greens and yellows on the grass and red, yellow blues to color the blacktop. Multiple colors applied wet-in-wet help to create a glow. The grass and blacktop would appear flat and more like a coloring book had I not used several colors.

In the next step, I painted the cerulean blue sky. Upon completing that, I noticed the driveway and grass looked washed out and re-painted both of them, darkening as I went. I also painted the first wash of shadows on the fence. I  painted the dark area of the woods behind the fence and under the trees with a combination of sage green and burnt sienna.

The next step was the most tedious part of the painting. I intended to use gesso and a sponge to blot in the white flowers these trees would eventually have and could not imagine painting in every little branch through the sponge marks of gesso, so I took the time to paint the branches from what I could see of them. I used burnt sienna, prussian blue, new gamboge and olive green for the branches and trunks of the pear trees. I used olive green and sage green for the leafy forms I added in an attempt to begin to define the values in and around the leafyparts of these trees. I also fed in light washes of prussian blue and permanent rose for the warm and cool backgrounds I saw in and out of the blossoms on these trees. In short, I was attempting to define the areas of color that would peek through the gesso, once applied.

I then took a thirsty sponge (one that has been soaked in water and squeezed to get all the drippiness out)  and dipped it lightly into gesso and blotted it on scrap paper (to take out big blobs) and began blotting in the white flowers on the trees. I was careful to select a sponge that would create the kind of texture I wanted as sponges vary.  This took some time and a great deal of patience as I had to keep dipping and blotting to prevent large blobs of gesso from being applied.

  finished painting

To complete the painting I painted in the branches of the woods in the background with a rigger and color mixtures of burnt sienna and the greens and blues I had used in the rest of the painting. I worked my brush in and around the gessoed areas to define the shadow areas of the three trees and applied white gouache to the lighter areas of the split rail fence.  The grass required another touch up of yellows and greens as it appeared washed out again after I had worked on the back ground and shadows within the trees.

This is a scene to the east of the driveway of the place where I plein air painted last summer. You can see them as you come up the long driveway I featured in this post here titled “Coming Home”.