reworking things

I've been a bit remiss in my blogging duties, it's been a bit of a crazy time for me. Since I now have a gallery in Carmel, which is cool (Rieser Fine Art) and I now have to furnish them with paintings on the double (they have an ad coming out in the next Am Art Review), I had to look at what I had available in the studio to submit for some kind of presence in the gallery. I've posted most of the stuff already that I'm shipping but there was this one painting that I did on the fly, a 16x20 that I tore through because I started it at the end of the day around five and could only put an hour and a half into it. Fortunately I was smart enough to shoot some reference pics of the scene and had some back up info to paint from plus I had my new and now fav book on William Wendt to look at for inspiration. I'm sure I have a pic of the before somewhere but for the life of me, can't find it.

So all I can do is tell you what I did to this thing to rework it. I actually repainted every inch of it, which I usually do, with the intent of moving the eye better throughout the image. Mostly I focused on the ground plane trying to simplify eyeflow and guide the viewer better up to the hills. A few of the things I did was to give the far trees more distance by bluing them up, I recarved the exteriors of the trees to make them a little more "leafy" and changed all the bushes so the weren't so same-same. The I changed the original layout from the path coming in from the far right to a little tail moving up through the middle. Turned out okay, they liked it anyway.