Green man

I'm fast running out of pictures in my Mythomorphia book that I want to spend time coloring. I picked this one to do next, a green man, which I didn't know was a "thing" until I Googled it.

I colored the oak leaves brown using my Derwent pencils, making them look like what they look like in the fall, because of a memory I had that day of helping the Jacob family sweep up their garden in Columbia, Missouri, years ago. Mrs Carolyn Jacob, then already in her 60s, made sloppy Joes for me and the couple of Korean students, and we sat down to the meal in her garden. The air was already crisp, and I remember wearing a sleeveless cashmere pullover that mum knitted for me over my shirt.

Me, the girl from a tropical country, right, so what did I know about their trees? Carolyn pointed out the leaves to me - oak, hickory, maple. So this is for you, Carolyn.

By now, layering colors is the norm for me. No other way to achieve depth and realism. I did the oak leaves still with a tinge of green in their spines. Each leaf had four colors in it - mid brown, deep brown, Lincoln green and that lovely color, pimento.

The strong greens: am not sure if that's ivy or not, but now, looking back, i think the green is too raw.

After a while, this drawing was starting to test my endurance, so I pretty much finished it to get it over and done with. Maybe there's too much brown in it. This is, after all, green man, right? I didn't want to add more brown by coloring the woody branches in that shade, so I used my Derwent grey green (and a couple of brownish shades) instead, which I think has hewed the color palette for the piece back to the green side.