Tree woes

One of the challenges in making this painting based upon the 7x7cm landscape I painted is that there are times when I need to use my imagination to add detail in service of the painting, rather than solely base my painting from the small source. I went into this tree with some measure of caution, but quickly got wrapped up in the detail and went way overboard. In the second image below you can see that the bare tree in the foreground lost it’s definition, particularly where it overlapped with the green tree behind it. As much as i would like each painting session to perfectly portray my vision, this didn’t. So late last night I went back in and started blocking out limbs and putting definition back into the tree. The trickiest parts will be cleaning up limbs that intersect the sky—i’m going to do as little of that as possible. The next pass will be focused on the underpainting of the green tree, then repainting the black limbs where they need to be cleaned up.