Tree Mother

I thought I'd give you another work-in-progress to see. This painting, Tree Mother, originates from a subconscious drawing I did several years ago while in school. I scribbled some random lines on paper, then drew what I saw in the scribbles. Here's the result.


At first I kept thinking of a mother sitting on a park bench, holding her child out of reach of a curious dog. I started a small oil painting of it a few years ago, and enjoyed attempting to make the background look like leaves of trees with an abstract mottled pattern. The bench was floating, then had tree trunks growing straight up out of it. However, the rest of the painting was a not going well. I abandoned it for a while.


When I discovered my affinity for pastels, I decided to give this piece a try again. In this case, I stuck pretty close to the original drawing. My initial block-in of shapes had some proportional differences, which you can see I corrected in the next stage. The skin tones are first laid down as red and orange, which will show through later layers of paler, less intense colors that go on top. This is called underpainting, and it gives the skin a natural glow instead of muddy grey which you get by trying to mix the color directly (or at least, I do!)


I made the baby's head smaller here, and redrew the face. My husband remarked that I seemed to be doing several on the same theme in a row: dogs, mothers and children! (Beach Dog came right before this one). I like focusing on a theme for several paintings at a time, though. Exploring different ways of expressing the same idea... here, it is about protectiveness.


Mother's head was still too big at this point, so I trimmed that down a lot, and made her legs longer. I also cropped the hair by letting it float away from the skull a bit where it begins to transform. Alfonso (my husband) liked her better squat and short, but I wanted to keep it closer to the original. More layers of color now and the skin is starting to look like real flesh-tones, not so orange. (Except I haven't done the legs yet).


In the final stage here you can see that I repositioned the dog's paws, trimmed mother's waist some, and finished up all the final touches and the ground cover. If you look closely at the details, you can see that there are branches growing from the mother's hair, and the german shepard dog also is growing a tree, like a carousel animal.