My friend took this photo for me as the camera on my phone keeps glitching. I’m part way through painting a green woman for someone and I want the background behind her to be trees.

There are silver birches in the grounds of the community centre where I attend our art group so we went out and I chose the trees I wanted pictures of. It helps to see the shapes of their trunks and branches instead of trying to imagine them. The details of the bark are fascinating and I hope to try and reproduce the patterns.

I’ll post a photo of the work in progress later but I want to tidy it up a bit first, it’s a bit like a mediaeval illustration at the moment, I need to make it more subtle.

I think there’s a bit of Pareidolia going on here as I can see a face in the tree bark.