Although I've worked on it for several more hours this week, the kind of subtle tonal adjustments I'm making, mean that the differences from last week might not be so apparent, so I haven't included the overall view, here. 

However, I'm managing not to get bogged down in detail and bringing the whole painting on at a uniform rate to maintain the overall balance. 

The leaf litter and structure of the roots have become more resolved in parts, but I'm not going to labour over them. 

The dark area behind the trunk has started to see some foliage in a muted green, and I decided to soften the curve of the bare trunk on the left edge of the tree hole. 

I sanded back some of the paint on the trunk.  This revealed a nice texture and also enabled me to soften the edges of some of the dappled light and shade. 

 This week, I'll be working mainly on the bluebells and background foliage, which should really start to pull it all together.

Beech Roots Progress

I've done a little more work on this over the last few days.  I'm now bringing the shadow areas down in tone, and have started to add a few bark textures to the body of the tree.  I've inserted two close-ups to show you how loosely I've painted it so far. 

Beech Trunk detail

Some loosely applied brushwork in washes and glazes accumulates into an illusion of detail rather quickly. At this stage, I haven't mixed white into my colours.

Beech Roots Detail

Working in front of people, and standing up at the drawing board has helped me to keep this painting at arm's length, where I can always see the whole painting, stand back, squint a lot, and not become consumed by small areas of detail.  I'm at a critical stage now, where I need to concentrate on bringing the painting on as a whole to retain the overall balance of light, colour and just enough detail.

Beech Roots Progress. 24” x 16”, 61cm x 41cm

I didn't photograph the early stages of this painting, but wanted to put it here so that those of you who saw me working on it at my Chester Zoo exhibition can now see as it progress through to the finished piece.

It's an acrylic painting on board which I prepared with several coats of a white acrylic gesso primer.  The whole area has been washed in to capture the main areas of light.  The main challenge for me now is to maintain the glow of dappled sunlight as I gradually darken the areas of shadows.  Sunlit areas on tree bark are often darker than they appear on digital images which may exaggerate the harsh contrast between light and shade.

It was always my intention to have a bird in the scene, but this is quite a large tree, so a Nuthatch or Great Spotted Woodpecker will appear as quite a small element in the painting.

first sketch

Another local scene.  It was the dappled sunlight on the beech tree which caught my eye during a walk through the woods.

I went back to sketch the tree without the dappled sunlight - so I could understand the shape and structure of it.

I redrew the tree onto a board primed with acrylic gesso, and waited for the next sunny morning.

The sunshine was intermittent, which meant having to work quickly.

My main aim in the first session was to establish the form of the tree in relation to its surroundings, and to capture the pattern of sunlight.

first oil session