In this latest piece, I wanted to step away from the cooler, muted tones of the deep woods and test what happens when you push a landscape into high-vibrancy territory. The goal was to capture an impression of folklore—that feeling of stepping into a stretch of woods where the light behaves strangely and the trees carry an ancient, deliberate presence. Across these recent folklore experiments, a common thread has begun to emerge: the quiet, mysterious presence of distant figures going about some unknown, ancient task just beyond the foreground.
Technically, this was built on cold press paper using a multi-layered approach with Faber-Castell Pitt pens, Sakura fine liners, and bullet-tip acrylic pens.
The process relied on layering different styles of mark-making to establish depth and tactile friction. I used tight ink strokes and heavy cross-hatching with the fine liners to map out the complex, muscular bark and gnarled root structure of the central trunk. The rich, vibrant color fields throughout the piece were applied directly with Pitt pens. To create the vibrating, atmospheric background, I layered fine, precise dots of pointillist texture over those washes using bullet-tip acrylic pens. The tooth of the cold press paper catches those opaque micro-dots, allowing the canopy to hum with an electric, golden light.
It’s an exercise in narrative and structural contrast—letting the rigid precision of ink linework clash against the soft, vibrating texture of a pointillist sky while hinting at a world moving quietly in the shadows.
