On to the last step for the tree drawing. It’s experimental, so to not screw the drawing up, I made digital tests.

The final drawing of the “Spirit Tree” artwork I’ve shown earlier (and the first step is here). I always envisioned this to have colors, but were not sure how much. Kinda just wanted to catch the atmosphere, but the risk is always to overwhelm the drawing. That should still be central.

In another tree drawing from Vlieland’s under-woods I used very soft colors. It worked well, but I would like to go more bold.

Some filters on the reference photo (showed earlier), can also help to reveal color relationships more clearly. Here I essentially removed the dark/bright elements, and pushed up all colors. This can give inspiration as to where to use warm or cold tones.

This is the outcome of some filters in Photoshop, that reveal the color relations in the reference photo.

That led to some trying around on the computer what color scheme could work. I can even show it to others to check how they react. The shadows were tricky. I want them to show – and be colder than the rest. But my test-public found it often confusing. At the end I’ll have to do it more subtle than in most of these variations.

Nine variations that I made in Photoshop, to quickly see what could work

And now I prepared the painting itself for the watercolor step.

I used “Gecko Tape” to mask areas that should stay white.