Atmospheric landscape with trees in morning haze. Sepia ink, watercolor browns and blues with additions of gouache delft blue. Bamboo reed pen, steel dip pen, pastel pencil, pencil and washes of muted warm white gouache. 7x9 inches on watercolor paper from a notebook.

I'm thinking about Paulus Bril and Momper with themes by Claude Gellée here. This could be a placid Italian river setting, or easily evolve into a 1500's mountainous landscapes from a traveling experience. Nothing like the Northerners awakening from their Gothic past... “Do you know the land where the lemon-trees flower?” (Goethe). These days reading quite a lot about the draw of Rome on the Dutch, Flemish, French and German artists around the 1600's.

I just wanted to thank the folks over at Pratique Des Arts magazine in France for showcasing one of my tree sketches. The theme of the short article was called La poesie des arbres, poetry of trees in english. Some other excellent tree focused artists from France, USA and the Netherlands were in the recent issue number 101 as well.

In addition there was an article in ImagineFX (Dec.2011) highlighting the successful efforts for the SketchTravel book project and auction late last year and the artists involved with making that happen. One of the images showed a digital composition warm up for a gouache windmill piece I did next to the final gouache.

Rapid sketch of pine trees near the Legion of Honor museum, San Francisco, Ca.
6"x9" on Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper -warm gray. Marker, Pitt Pen, white pencil and water-soluble black pencil.

Pastoral Storm Break Gouache on Stonehenge fawn colored paper. 7x10"
Rapidly painted from imagination. Thinking about John Constable's full-sized oil sketches What a great idea to paint loosely at a larger size to get warmed for the 'finished' version.

Sepia Tree Cluster study with shadow-obscured artist sketching on the lower left side. Italia Acquerello water color paper -6x6 inches. Watercolor, gouache, sumi ink, Liquitex Ink! - transparent raw umber, sepia ink, dip pen, reed pen, charcoal pencil with additions of Pitt artist pens along w/ sable brush work.

Happy New Year! All the best to everyone and may this be a very creative year to all of you.

Just finished a recent landscape commission using Pt.Reyes National Seashore (West Coast of Northern California) for inspiration. Oils on linen - 80 x 29 inches. In my post from earlier this summer I shared a handful of digital color sketches and the client picked this one to develop.