This beautiful farm in South Carolina is filled with life. A herd of goats and flocks of chickens roam the grounds. Along with the animal life on the farm, there are mushrooms growing out of logs placed up against trees. These logs have spores on them and create a great environment for the growth of certain fungi. For the next painting in the series, the owner wanted a close up of the mushrooms growing out of the bottom of a log, and the side of another log. He cropped the images for these paintings personally and is happy with how they turned out. More of his photography can be found on his Instagram page @freakishy_green.
Number 7 in the series took a very long time to paint. Over the course of 2 days, I did not even clock the hours. This painting has so many layers of paint, texture work, and many hours of time spent on it. The white mushrooms were brought out by painting the negative space behind them in order to keep their soft texture. I used Cerulean for a light blue shade to emphasize a shadow on the fungi. The Burnt Sienna color at the top of the vertical painting was used to represent the pine needles along the forest floor. Painting these was challenging and exciting so I decided the next painting would be a mushroom piece as well.
Witchy Acres Series 1 Number 8 is a zoomed in version of mushrooms growing on the side of a log. I love the contrast of color in this piece. To bring out the mushrooms, I used Cerulean, Windsor Blue, Burnt Umber, and the red used was Permanent Alizarin Crimson. I mixed the red and blues to create light violets for shadows as well, and focused on creating the negative space around the mushrooms with darker colors to enhance their white glow, and soft features. Each painting is unique in their own way and both were a joy to create. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did painting them. Thank you for reading!
-Karen Hilliard