I did this study of a few trees in my backyard this morning. There are times when I walk away from a morning of study and feel pretty good about the end result. This time I mostly feel like I learned a lot from this and, possibly, I’ll scratch at it a bit more in my office later on, but I’m not panning on putting this into any kind of a competition.

I definitely need more stark darks in my plein air setup because I kept trying to find a green that would do the job I needed it to do in the background, but I just couldn’t get there. I wanted the leaves up front that are overlapping the thick upright tree to really pop, but they aren’t getting there for me. It’s all too much in the same value range I think. I do think that this is closer to what I was actually seeing than what I wanted to see and more importantly what I wanted to show people who looked at the painting.

The fallen tree in the background needs to curl up more and then roll away in a more convincing way as well. That, again, will be easier to achieve with some richer darks, and some better drawing of the shape initially. By better drawing I mean inventing a bit more than I did so that I can get the cross contours of the shape to work for me better.

I had some fun with some orange in a few spots that I regret now.

One thing that might end up being the best solution for this is to crop out a large part of outer painting and just try to focus in on the central idea. This is something Cathy McCormick has shown me in the past, and I have nothing to lose so I’ll give it a shot and see if I can find something good inside there that the overall composition has made invisible.