Shadow Trees

I generally draw and paint either from direct observation or with a photograph as reference, but I had a desire to try a technique for working from imagination that I have seen Robert Burridge demonstrate.  He sometimes flings wet and juicy acrylic paint at his paper, lets it drip, then uses negative painting to simplify and define shapes. 

That's what I have done here.  It's hard to tell from the photo, but there are layers and layers of colors in the trees - transparent greens and blues, scarlets, purples.  Along the way I sometimes stopped to add little sky holes, or break up wet paint with splashes of rubbing alcohol.  It was very messy. 

Burridge has a demonstration video where he uses an opaque yellow to paint around the tree shapes.  I wouldn't choose yellow as a first choice, but I decided to give it a go, and was happy with the results.

I suspect I'd need to do lots of these to become more comfortable with the process and with creating convincing tree shapes.  But for now, this has gone a long way toward getting me out of my recent creative funk.