A Nart Project

Behold The White Tree of Gondor

A while back I came across an article on some website where there is a guy who finds old dead trees in the desert that are still standing and he paints them in really bright colors. They look really cool and I wish I could find the article but nothing is turning up. Anyway, as it just so happens I have a bonsai tree that succumbed to a spider mite infestation last year and it’s been sitting around on my porch for the last few months. I thought maybe it might be good for a model to draw from & whatnot but that article gave me another idea.

I don’t know what paint that guy used (probably exterior house paint), but this situation is a bit different because of the scale. Originally I thought of using acrylic paint as it’s very opaque. But…it’s necessarily kinda thick. A lot of the finer branches on a bonsai are very thin and probably would get a bit globby. Sure you can thin acrylics with water but you sacrifice opacity and that wouldn’t look very good. I thought I would have to strip out the small stuff and just go with the major structures, but then I had a major idea this morning; I can pre-paint the tree with thin washes of gesso first! Gesso, for you non-nartists is a white base substance that we prime surfaces to paint on. It’s usually as thick as acrylic paint but you can thin it out with water. I did so and started painting the bonsai with it on Saturday. What you see above is with two coats done with a small brush. What does this get me? It means that I can use watercolors instead and that opens up some wonderful things.

This particular species has a papery bark that has an “iffy” relationship with the tree itself. It’s kinda crackly and easily peel able. It was like that even before it died and has only increases those characteristics post-demise. Still, it’s an interesting characteristic and I want to try and preserve it as much as possible. The thin gesso does this beautifully. It binds the remaining bark to the tree and strengthens it too while leaving the essential structure intact. It will need at least one more coat, probably two.

After spending about 3.5 hours  of hand painting two coats on the tree and getting near the thick Pain In The Ass cluster at the top I remembered that I had a perfectly good airbrush that would have made a quick, thorough work out of doing this at a fraction of the time. Mmmm, but the quick & easy aren’t always the best ways and after a few moments of reflection I understood that the manual painting of gesso required me to really learn and understand how fluids move on complicated surfaces and structures of this tree and it was valuable practice for the final paint job. I went ahead and finished it off by hand last night. Also, this four hours of an intense scrutiny of a tree’s structure from all angles. That’s actually pretty useful exercise all by itself. That said, I still plan to finish of the gesso application with the airbrush today.

***Udate***

Airbrush done and it probably isn’t going to get any whiter than this. The next stage is going to be tricky and involves plaster. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to do it either.

Happy Easter everyone!