Lindy Whitton Studio

Postcard No 39: Life by the River

I like the way Nature can surprise me when I focus in on the details. Today’s postcard was inspired by the old apple trees at Castle Forbes Bay that have a mantle of lichen growing over them. I stopped the car to check them out and then found a branch that had broken off in the tangle of blackberries and bracken at the side of the road.

The branch is almost completely covered in lichen which softens the edges and makes it hard to recognise what it really is when zoomed in.

My aim was to capture the light falling on the branch and contrast the cooller blue grey of the aged wood with the warm colours of the dying bracken in the background.

I probably overdid the lichen …it could do with a few harder edges and there’s maybe too much contrast between the dark and light branches because of how much lichen I added.

I am happy with the sense of light so all is not lost and I can tackle the lichen issue if I paint it again.

I placed the vertical tree truncks in the background as another contrast to all the angles of the lichen covered branches .

I’m not sure how much I like it but I did enjoy painting it so that’s a win!

I’m using acrylic gouache with a 1 cm flat brush on a kraft paper sketchbook. As with most of my postcard series it’s a small 10×15 cm painting.

I took up painting as a creative outlet when my children were young and it saved my sanity later on when my professional role in a hospital setting became very stressful. When I painted I could leave all my worries behind and just enjoy being in the creative moment. A good painting was a bonus but the real result was a calm hour after a hectic and demanding shift.

Too often in life we focus on the end result rather than the process so it’s very therapeutic to have creative time that is all about the process…enjoying, experimenting, playing, learning and sharing.

How do you create some quiet time in your life?