I told you last week about a landscape painting that might not be salvageable. The answer for me was to just keep going. I got a little bit lost when I was painting in the tree section and it looked terrible. I forgot to take any photos but decided I would be go back in and add more dark values in between the trees and get that section figured out better.

So here it is after I added in the dark values and worked out which trees were more in the foreground and which were fading back. I could have left it like this but I felt it could be better. Now to determine what it needed. I used my croppers to see which way I liked it.

Did I like it with less sky or no sky at all? Neither of these seemed to have enough contrast and were a bit boring. So I looked back at my reference book Watercolor Painting Outside the Lines by Linda Kemp and decided I would add more sky and show light coming through the trees. I had tried this on my first attempt but didn’t like the results but thought maybe I had a better handle on how to do it this time. So I added more pink sky with a variety of pinkish tones.

Here’s the end result. I think that is a bit more dramatic, certainly not perfect but I learned a lot about negative space painting with this landscape. So the lesson is, keep going and practice, practice, practice. I have relearn that lesson on a regular basis 🙂