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Monday, March 23, 2015

Painting a Dogwood Tree in Three Easy Steps

'The Queen of Spring'            8x10            pastel              ©Karen Margulis
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My dogwood trees won't bloom. They are about five years old and every spring I hope they will but so far nothing but nice green leaves.  I will have to be satisfied with painting dogwoods in bloom. Flowering trees can be a challenge to paint. They are like giant bouquets of flowers.....plenty of details to get caught up in. It is so easy to get carried away and end up with a tree covered in dots and blobs of color.

I have simplified my dogwood trees into three easy steps.

1.  Paint the trunks. Dogwoods have trunks with character. The are lyrical and irregular. I use a dark blue or purple pastel and draw some lyrical painterly lines for the trunks. I make sure they get thinner as they get taller.

2. Block in the MASS OF FOLIAGE. I treat the flowers as a mass. I don't paint individual blooms. I put down the darkest colors I see in the mass. The flowers are typically a creamy white to pink. They may appear pure white especially against the dark backdrop of the woods....but the flowers are not really pure white.

I didn't use pure white for my flowers. I started with violets and dull greens of a medium value. As I developed the masses I used lighter values such as pale yellows and pinks. I also develop the background at the same time using the background colors to carve away at the flower masses making sky holes.

3. Refine the Tree. I continue to add lighter and lighter values to the flower masses. I am still keeping the large masses intact. I am careful to leave some of the dark showing. I am trying to create the form of the trees. I also work on the foreground bushes and add a few hits of azaleas.

Since I am working on Canson paper and I don't have a lot of tooth, I decide to use some workable fixative so I could build more layers. I finish the tree with some dancing flower shapes...these are my brightest and heaviest marks. I place them carefully so that they move they eye around the painting. I don't paint every flower. I want to leave something to the viewer's imagination.

The pastels I used for the dogwood blossoms

My initial block in...keeping shapes simple

Beginning to add the lighter values and creating volume in the tree
 Besides painting dogwoods I spent the day at the computer making my first installment of my video blog or vlog. I plan to share it tomorrow so don't miss my premiere!

3 comments:

  1. Beautiful dogwood. Can't wait to see your vlog. I look forward to your posts every day. Thanks a bunch!

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  2. Beautiful painting, Karen. Hang in there. It took our pink dogwood 10 years to bloom and then voila! Last year it was covered in blossoms.

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  3. Gorgeous dogwoods! Thanks for showing your stages. I love the shapes of those trunks, they were the first thing I noticed. So beautiful.

    Interesting about flowering trees. You're right too. A lot of times the flowers are so intense they are just like foliage but another hue. There were a whole lot of Bradford pears and crepe myrtles in Arkansas when I lived there, and New Orleans had crepe myrtles all over the place. San Francisco has a lot of flowering trees but more of them have scattered flowers in foliage like magnolias than the all-over effect of dogwood or crepe myrtle.

    Looking forward to your vlog! I didn't comment yesterday but I'm definitely enjoying your previous videos so I know this will rock!

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