Lincoln Park Lichen Bark

In  this image I really worked to bring out the layers of lichen and moss that were slowly growing their way up this tree.  Simplifying the background trees to just simple shapes with little surface detail and making the foreground tree have most of it's shape relationship with the sun patches cutting back across the ground really brought this image together.  the shapes created by the color patches on the right side of the trees base really got wonderfully contorted.  I would love to do one of these as an enormous mural so that the hard edged abstract shapes took on a different scale.

Lincoln Park Lichen Bark

Hane's dock snow forms

Here are a few more digital studies of snow and the forms and shapes it creates.  I braved deeply snow covered roads to travel the half mile just after a blizzard to find these wind carved moments around trees near the bay in this park.  As I worked on these I was struck by the unexpected textural relationship that emerges when the tones become hard edged between the micro color zones in the snow and the bark of the tree.  Very unifying and rich.  The colors were also a challenge here to find the greyed violets and blue blends in the snow and the trees.

Hanes snow bowl 1

Hanes snow bowl 2