Through the Trees

So I wanted to get something special for my friend's birthday, but I have no moneys. So I decided to make her an oil painting. So, TADA!

Ok, it was a bit more complicated than that. I wanted to make the painting something that she would look at and go, "Oh, I remember that!" Something that we shared together. So I came up with this. When we were kids, we came up with this idea that we could go to another world and even went so far as to go into a nearby forest before deciding that it just wasn't going to happen. This idea actually inspired another drawing I did my freshman year, but I figured I could do it again, only make it ten times more complicated and paint it.

For reference pictures, I asked my friend to have her little sister take a picture of her with a cell phone and send the pic to me. That didn't work too well, so on New Years, I took a picture of her. Then I went out into the same woods we went to when we were kids and scoped out the spot looking for a good picture. Unfortunately, a tree had fallen on top of the original spot that had been our "Portal", so I had to find just the right angle to hide the fallen tree. This involved standing in some bushes when I took the picture, which is why there's so much fore-ground vegetation.

This was a pain to paint, mostly because of the fore-ground vegetation. I would spend hours on a spot and look at it and realize that I hadn't actually done a whole lot to progress the painting. It didn't help that when I was originally painting the ground, I accidentally painted it way too dark and I had to wipe off all of the paint on the ground and start over. I finally fixed the problem by painting the ground orange and then progressively adding brown rather than starting with brown. It seems to have worked.

Anyway, this was made using oil paints. I started at the beginning of January and finished Febuary 20th, two days before my friend's birthday. Yayy....