Slowly making progress . . .

I have the start of a busy school year to blame for my lack of blog posts lately.  I am a mom, after all :)  Getting back to business, I am working now on refining all of the details of the painting.  I'm deep into Stage 5, trying to make everything look crisp and clean.  Let me see if I can show you what I mean.  Scroll down to the bottom of my last posting and take a look at those acorns.  See if you can tell what I've done since then:

It is difficult to zoom in close and keep the details with this software, but can you see that with some transparent washes of brown, I've given the acorn fruit more shape? And by going in with dark reddish brown I've made the grooves in the acorn tops more distinct.  The effect is to make them "pop" off the page, and seem very lifelike.

By the way, do you have any idea just how many acorns one white oak tree can produce?  And what happens to all those acorns anyway?  Do the squirrels get every last one?  A study was done not long ago of one mature tree, which produced a whopping 15,000 acorns in one season.  That's enough seeds to start an entire forrest!  But of that number, 83% were eaten by squirrels and other animals; 6% were attacked by insects, weevils and larvae; and nearly all the rest were naturally imperfect.  Less than 1% of that initial number actually sprouted, and of those few survivors, half died as sprouts.  Imagine the energy expended to produce that paltry result!  And yet think of all of the Life that tree sustains and supports in the process: the birds and beasties and bugs and life we can't even see with the naked eye.  The next time you see a sappling, congratulate it for beating the odds!

I'll leave you with a quote, in Latin no less, which sums up my admiration for this mighty tree:
De minimus maxima.
No translation needed.