My walls are filled with trees, forests and mountains art subjects . I have always lived in the Pacific Northwest and these subjects feel homey to me. I have not however, learned how to create my own art using the subject matter I enjoy the most. So, to rectify this, I searched through my watercolor books and found a good excercise of painting a pather meandering through a forest. I followed it step by step, and documented a few more details that I used as I went along.

First I masked out the foreward most trees using masking tape and Masking Fluid (image 1)

Then I used some washes to create the sky, subtle mid background and foreground areas that will peek through the forest when it is complete. I painted freely across the masked areas

I then used dark blue/greens to silhouette the darker hidden trees in the forest, painting freely across the masked areas.

Now it was time to work on the foreground trees.I removed the masking and washed in the base tree colors, tans and browns. The image below shows the base wash on the right side of the paper, and the left I have started to flesh out the detail.

So, for the bark, I used a dry brush loaded with fairly wet, thick paint and lightly drug it vertically over the foreground trees letting the bumps in the paper, voila...bark! (See right side of image above where I've started on the bark)

For the branches and knots, I tried for darks underneath and used a rigger type brush to draw the "joint" where the branch meets the trunk.

Unlike the sample painting, I felt that more white space in the path area would add more whimsy to my image, more like a "hint" of a path.