Acrylic Painting #2: Yellow Tree

Bright yellow tree on a small island in the middle of water at night. Its leaves are blowing in the wind.

This painting began with a blue paint tube that exploded from the wrong end. It almost felt like it was destined to fail from those first moments of cleaning blobs of paint, but I persevered. I was in the mood to try some of the techniques I had learned in the past few days since the last attempt. A little mishap was not going to stand in the way.

I had fun with this painting. One of my goals is scaling things back and creating simpler backgrounds that allow me to focus on a primary element. I feel like I accomplished this fairly well.

The biggest lesson I learned with this project was that I really need to make sure a dark background is completely dry before trying to lay yellow on top of it. It took coat after coat after coat to make the tree cover the background without blending with it. It seemed to work out though and gave the tree more depth.

One of my sisters had already claimed dibs on whatever my next painting was, so she gets this one. It’s always good to have family to unload practice runs on. I am still working toward creating art for hanging in my own home. It will just take more learning to get there.