Moving all over the canvas…I adjust the finest details, adjust the shadows and more importantly, the warm sculpting glow of the morning sun on all the objects it touches.

I signed the piece and then mounted it on my desktop Best easel.  Then I always move the completed piece into my house from room to room to observe it in different light and time of day.  This allows me to make slight adjustments that I may have missed before signing off.

In the end, I decided not to put the lavendar in the foreground corner.  I was very pleased with the fencing and the plants would have been in the dark of the oak’s shadow leaving them to be nothing more than clutter.

This was a relatively quick piece with 45 hours.  Final value:  $2450
SOLD

I reached for my favorite brushes..numbers 2, 1 and 0.  Now comes the reward!

I moved from middle to foreground laying in all the details and modeling all the finest elements.

As I move around the painting, I am also making value changes in darks and lights.

I layed the form layer for the foreground fencing and set the painting aside to dry for the final work…scrumbling and the smallest accents of light and dark.

*As a treat to the owners of this ranch and painting, I engraved their initials in the gate post with my size 0 brush.

It was finally time to lay in the foreground road…

As I needed to protect the foreground fencing, after each layer (3), I would ‘clean’ all the way down to the underpainting on each post and rail.

I worked the details on the oak tree trunk using the darkest values.  I mixed burnt umber and burnt sienna for the darkest darks.  Then I added a touch of titanium white to accentuate the bark high spots.  After this dries, I will come in and accent the finest details with the lightest value, or highlights.

Now I raise my canvas on my Best easel for the standing work.  The canopy will require that I move in and out on my feet to keep check on the values and shapes.

I use a fairly large #6 bristle fan brush.  I load tons of sap green on one end and ivory black on the other.  This allows me to flip the brush from one end to the other quickly while I am shaping the canopy.

While my thick paint is still wet, I come back in with sap green and titanium white in varying mixes to adjust medium values and touch up any ‘see-through-the-tree-to-the-sky’ areas that got lost in my exuberant earlier brush work.

Finally, I mix dioxazine purple, ivory black, sap green and titanium white to lay in the dark, medium and light values of the dying branch on the backside of the tree.  This was actually a whole tree between the foreground and background tree, which I removed from my painting.  However, my favorite color in this painting was the lavendar of the sunlit dead branches, so I took some artist’s perogative and made it a dying branch of my main oak.  Not yet drafted on the canvas…will be some beautiful lavendar flowers in foreground corners in front of the upfront fencing to tie it all in.

  I began putting the dark and lightest values in the middle ground.  

Then I needed to paint the light green and lavendar leaves that were behind the main oak tree.  After they were in, I layed in the darks on the tree.

This will cure over the weekend and then I can start the details on the tree trunk and the canopy of dark leaves overhead.  I had to quit for the day as the good light in the studio faded away.  (which is why this pic is kinda dark, sorry.)