Silverbirch trees by Rebecca Yoxall

Happy Friday!

It's my turn on the blog again today and I am sharing a little painting of Silverbirch trees that I created using Brusho and wax resist. Wax resist is such a great method for retaining white paper or light areas and adding texture. 

I began by grabbing a piece of  good quality watercolour paper and using a pencil drawing out the tree shapes and a few branches. Once I was happy with the composition I added wax to the tree trunks in a random pattern. pressing quite hard with the wax stick filling some areas fully and leaving other bits untouched to represent the white areas of bark on each tree. I also placed a range of lines representing branches using a lighter pressure for a less intense line.

This may be difficult to see until the colours go on the top. 

Here I have sprinkled Yellow, Purple and ultramarine Brusho colours directly onto dry paper and then sprayed with a water spray to diffuse and dilute the crystals.

With a brush I have gently painted to the bottom of the tree line for a more solid washed in appearance.

After waiting for the first part to dry I repeated the same method for the ground/grass/moss using the Yellow and Ultramarine.

After diluting with the water spray I used my brush to further blend the colours building an array of green shades and sprinkling more of the colours to make a denser shade.

This already looked quite interesting but I wanted to give the appearance of grass, mossy stones and shadows so I layered up by sprinkling and dragging more colour across in sections and scratching lines upwards with a plastic palette knife.  

       

This was also the point where I threw in some extra trees in the background using a mix of Ultramarine and Dark Brown before continuing with some Black Brusho that I had mixed on a palette. Painting the dark flecks and markings on the tree bark really starts to show the effectiveness of the wax.

Each tree can be painted slightly differently with some darker and lighter shades depending on how much water is added to the black Brusho mix.

My final finishing touches included some extra branches with a small brush give more dimension and help bring the piece together. Also some splatters with white paint. The wax has worked for both the effect of the solid white tree bark and fine branches.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope you have a lovely day. See you on the blog again soon.