Only God can make a tree ...

Oak Tree on a September Morning © Karen Mathison Schmidt
20 x 16 x 1 • acrylic on cradled Gessobord
sides painted dark umber
SOLD • private collection, Germantown, Tennessee

Here's the finished painting. This one has a lot of layered color glazes, and some interesting texture.

Scroll down past the brushwork details to see the work-in-progress photos

And here are the extreme close-up brushwork details:



Here you can see where I used a palette knife to scrape in the suggestion of stems for the flowers:








And here are the work-in-progress photos:

Here you can see a little of the abstract background, over which I've started to block in my composition in blacks and blues:






Here's a close-up view of the flowers in the lower right section of the painting. I added some dark green where I wanted the stems to be, then added a layer of a lighter color and scraped away the lighter paint to show the dark green as the stems of the flowers: