New Painting: Be Gentle With Yourself.

After the jump is the progression of this painting from start (ish) to finish. I sold the original in Savannah (recap coming soon for that festival) over the weekend, thought I forgot to scan it and I'm so glad I was wrong. I DID scan it for prints before we left. whew! Prints are available in my shop.

 I drew the tree on tracing paper while the decoupage/paper dried. I had sketched something like what I ended up with during a meeting. So a doodle became a painting. I used pages from a Doctor Who book, scrapbooking paper and old postcards from people long-dead. I used two circle stencils to make the crescent moon, then put yellow paper within that drawing (drew it on with graphite pencil).

When I first painted it (didn't get pictures of it. darn!) I did the light purple all over. The shadows were all weird, and didn't make sense with the light of the moon, so I darkened up the purple, except around the moon. I also added more color in the tree. Drew the swirls of the trees with micro pens. Here you can see the moon is a tad yellow still, I ended up doing a bunch of layers of silver.

I really had to think about what I wanted to write on this one. I knew it would be in the green section, but I just didn't know what to say. Until I found this quote by Max Ehrmann: "Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars." It was perfect. I added it free-hand, based on a great font I'd found. I added more details with the micro pens, some shading with a graphite pencil, and called it done.