Dearest Reader,
I write to thee today to share with you the exciting new painting I have created. Grab thyself a cup of warm tea, for this letter is long. Finished one week ago, “King of the Forest” was a month in the making and it all started with a sketch…
Alright, enough of Ye Olde English (even though it was not really Ye Olde English.) I started this painting on January 4th of 2024. Yes, I marked the actual date I started it. In this new year, I am trying, emphasis on trying, to be better about marking how long each painting takes.
This painting originally started with a darker, dystopian undertone. My vision for the piece was, even though the city has collapsed, nature flourishes, hiding the ruins among beauty. While painting the first three trees, I decided to shift directions, being simpler in my approach to the piece. Instead of the more dystopian route, I went with a more light-hearted, hopeful scene.
Near the center of the painting, stands a young deer, for which the painting is named. The deer stands tall in the grassy landscape, a sense of purpose in him.
Sprinkled throughout the grass, there are flowers of many colors. This signals that spring has just begun, meaning new life, new opportunities.
Once the underpainting is dry, I begin to color block. What do I mean by that? I mean that I take the colors that I will most likely use in the painting and place them where I want them. For example, in this painting, I knew that the sky was going to be blue, so I took a watered-down blue and put it on the sky. I also knew that I wanted the trees to be some variation of Sap Green, so I laid down a rough tree shape in Sap Green.
Once those general colors and shapes are laid out, I can begin to refine the details and colors. For the tree branches and trunks, I used a mixture of Burnt Umber and Burnt Sienna. I started from the background and worked my way to the foreground. I knew that I wanted there to be a real depth and overlap between trees. To ensure that happened, I worked in stages. I started with the trees that I knew were going to be in the background or that stood alone.
I then carefully considered where I wanted other objects to fall among the trees. For instance, I wanted the altar to be in front of some of the trees, but behind another. So, when the trees in the back of the altar were finished, I added the altar before adding the tree in front of it. Once I had done those things, I started adding things like the logs and deer into the painting. Admittedly, the little pond was a bit of an after-thought. As I was going through the painting, I noticed that there was a lot of brown and green. So much so, that it began to flatten and loose the dimensionality that I was seeking. I brainstormed different ways to fix that problem and I came up with two solutions, the second of which I will discuss later. The first was to bring the blue of the sky down to the ground in the form of water. Adding the pond created a fantastic depth that was missing.
The pond was added as I was doing the grass, which took FOREVER. It was my own fault for deciding to do the grass the way I did. I used a small fan brush to do all the grass, except that in the bottom right corner, for which I used a medium fan brush. I carefully moved across the canvas with the fan brush, adding in the blades of grass. At the base of each row of grass, I added blue to better ground the grass.
Doing the grass like that took a good chunk of time because of drying time. I am so unbelievably happy with how the grass turned out! That being said, the whole piece had become flat, even though I had taken tremendous care to make sure there was depth. So, the second solution I devised to fix this problem, was adding flowers. Adding those little pops of colors (so contrary to the green), made the whole piece more cohesive and meshed so beautifully with the narrative.
I know I didn’t talk too much about the deer but that is honestly the most boring and simple part of the painting. But here’s another picture of the deer because it is pretty dang cute:
