Rolling Hills

55x46 cm canvas. I tried experimenting a bit with the hills. As always, I ramble about the process.

I liked the colours in the sky, but didn't have Indian Yellow in my paint set. I figured I didn't need to use transparent colour here, so first I tried using a warmer Cadmium Yellow, but that looked too orange, not how it looks in Bob's painting. Then I tried to use Lemon Yellow over it, and it looked fine, so that's what I used for the sky.

I wanted to do an experiment and make the hills forested and flatter, quite how you can find here sights of just trees and hills as far as you can see. I pulled the colour with 1" brush on the farther hills, and closer I used the fan brush I used to create them, but I'm not too sure, it looks a bit messy. Also in hindsight I find it a bit contradicting that it just so happens that there is a grassy field and leaf trees around a pond where we are looking at, when the background is hills of conifers. So maybe (grassy) hills would be better, like in the original...

I needed to make the grassy bits quite steep, because I had placed the background colours of the pond a tad too low, so they are that shape to cover all that white canvas. It came out ok.

I failed to get much depth to the pond, it's a bit flat on the far shore. The trees came out really well for my skills, they have an actual shape! The bushes look good too, and the reflections came out well. Highlights came out well as well, I've gotten the handle of managing the consistency of the paint with linseed oil - a pipette bottle is really handy for that!

So there's some good, and there's some questionable. All in all, I like it. Let this be an example as what the hills might look like as forested hills, see if you like it or not. :)

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