For the first one of these in color I wanted to try something different. I have a couple of books by Kevin Macpherson and he talks about using a very limited palette of yellow, red and blue. With these trees I was really wanting to explore greens and getting a feel for how to mix those so I gave his set-up a try. It was very disorienting to start with. I rely so much on Burnt Sienna that it was rough to try and “find” the browns and grays.
The limited palette forced me to slow down and really think about what the color was vs. reaching for a tube or Terre Verte. I was also really trying to work “fat over learn” with this one. There was no set underpainting and I used a heavily thinned coat to rough out what went where. I’m not sure the result was radically different from what I’ve been doing but it was great to expand and explore a little.