Yay! Done in time to ship. I’m hoping she likes how it turned out. I’m thrilled with the left hand forground trunk (it looks awesome in person), but not sure about the right hand foreground tree. I can’t say that I hate it, but I’m not entirely thrilled with it, either. But it is there in her yard, and it’s a rather major tree, so… it has to stay.

The finished piece.

I’m moving on this painting! Granted, it helps that I want to have this done for my mom’s birthday (which is mid-November), and I can’t work much on Jon’s painting at the moment (they need to send him out of town so I can get moving on it!)

The trees are starting to take shape, and you can now see some more shading on the grass as well. It’s coming together!

Getting some tree detail.

I’ve got the grass mostly set and now it’s time to add in the trees. I’d originally planned on making the scene a little more ‘zoomed out’, but it ended up this way, so I’m going with it. You can see some of my reference lines for the closer trees as well as the ground shading. These were done with a pastel chalk pencil, one of my favorite finds. Silly, maybe, but it makes my life much easier.

Better grass and some foreground bare trees.

Finally getting some of the foreground in. This is partially to get me off the trees (heheh) and partially to get rid of the rest of the white on the canvas, which can just start to get distracting.

A little bit of foreground color.

Adding in trees is a bit of a slow process for me. Even with far off trees, I still get a little caught up in all the details of them. I can’t seem to help myself.

Adding more of the trees on the cliff.

This is a painting I’m doing of my mom’s backyard (how beautiful it is!) as seen from her back porch. I started this live, but there just wasn’t enough time to get the detail into it that I wanted, so I’m now continuing with it at home from pictures. I’m surprisingly finding it tough to do it that way! Going from live (or ‘plein aire’ if you want to go with the french name for it) to painting with photos is harder than I thought it would be.

But this is where it’s at now.

The start of Zoar Valley Falls, most done live.