Clouds-800

In this painting I applied what I learned in Texture Study 1 to a real scene. I worked from a photo that I took in our backyard looking northeast. I spent 3 or 4 hours on this one over the course of two days. As I painted on the Touch I looked at the reference photo on my MacBook. I started by painting the gradated blue of the sky. This was the most difficult part as there is no easy way to make a blended color in Brushes. I then used the #3 brush set to large to paint the clouds. I saved the image at that point and the next day I made a duplicate Brushes document and added the trees. I first did the birches in the middle and then the maple on the right. Finally I added in the three firs on the left. I used an acetate sheet overlay on the Touch and traced (with water soluble ink so I could easily wipe it off) the outline of the three firs from the reference photo on my Touch. Then I went back into Brushes and used the overlay to check the placement and size of the firs. I had started them too small and too far to the left so I had to paint over my original fir trees. I really like the way the trees turned out – especially the birches in the middle.
 
Here’s the reference photo for comparison. I didn’t start with importing the reference photo into Brushes. I started with a blank canvas and just looked at reference
while I painted.

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