Next on the Agenda

I’ve finally conquered mountains — more or less — and I feel good about the skies I paint. So now, it’s time to turn my attention to all those glorious trees Mother Nature has given us.

Recently, I’ve started practicing trees, and while I can do them fairly well in practice, I don’t seem able to get them the way I want when I try to include them in a landscape. Sometimes it’s the color that’s wrong; sometimes it’s the shape that’s off. Sometimes it’s another problem, and sometimes it’s lots of problems all rolled together into one horrific tree.

Although I was happy with both the skies and the mountains in this painting, I wasn’t happy at all with the trees. I don’t care much for the color of the distant trees on the shoreline, and I don’t really like the tall pine. You can probably tell I struggled a bit with it. Adding a little highlighting only made it worse.

After dealing with the tree, I didn’t do much with the foreground, although I do like the bare sticks and branches I painted with a script brush.

My painting “plan of action” for the coming week involves painting trees — a lot of trees. Bear with me, feel free to offer any suggestions, and keep your fingers crossed. I’m hoping practice will lead to improvement and that soon my trees will make Mother Nature proud.

Even though my trees aren’t great right now, I still have fun painting them.