Portrait of Winter

Beautiful scene.Love the water.

I love this! If those bushes were a struggle, I can't wait to see what your easy as pie bushes will look like!
I adore your mountains...and your background trees! Omg!! Did you load multiple colors on the brush or did you actually highlight those trees? They are so perfect!

Thank you! I think getting the color of bushes is relatively easy, but have a strong vision for varied shapes of so many bushes as Bob did is a real skill…one that I’m still trying to develop. While Bob is remembered for his trees, mountains, and clouds, his bushes are just as amazing!

Mountains are fun because they offer limitless challenge and variation. Again, I’m slowly learning how to create mountain shapes that are varied from one another and realistic, rather than multiple peaks that look the same. Also, I really tried to apply less mountain color to the back ridge, as it makes the “distant misty mountain effect” much easier to pull off, and makes the front ridge stand out more. I learned this after painting with a friend and admiring his mountain ridges!

I did highlight the trees. Something that helped a bit was painting scrap cardboard with white gesso, then liquid white, and then covering it with clouds on a sky, then covering that with as many mountains as could fit, then painting as many evergreen trees as time would allow.

These trees are my best yet, though I have a tendency to get “too wide too soon,” and they came out a bit too symmetrical for my tastes, but they’re coming along.

Finding the right balance between symmetry and asymmetry, and learning to mostly avoid straight lines (there aren’t many straight lines in nature!) is something I keep on learning and playing with. It’s been a fun journey so far.