Tree #2

Wow. I may have to paint a lot of trees. It is so, so much fun. This time, I tried to go with a "thumbprint" type of paint stroke all oriented up and down and did not overlap colors as much as yesterday.

It's been extremely helpful to go back and revisit negative space. With these types of paint strokes and with the negative space, the edges between the tree and background are more suggested and less defined. Is this what is meant by having hard edges and soft edges?  I'm not sure, but these edges look very different from what I usually do. I mostly define edges with a hard, directional paint stroke that screams "hey, look at me. I'm an edge". That is not necessarily bad, but having variety is better. For awhile, I want to keep playing with this loose tree style to get this type of edge drilled into my brain.

As a point of reference, this is one of my favorite paintings. While there are fun blocky paint strokes in this painting, all of the edges between Chandler and the background are definite, hard and unyielding.