Sunset Painting Progress

I have been slowly making progress on my sunset painting. When I left off painting last, I was happier with it, however, the foreground rock reminded me of a dog lying down. Do you see it? I had to do something about that.

I also wanted to work on creating more depth to the painting and push the background further back. I found this hard to do since at sunset the trees are very dark, almost silhouettes. I had to use some artistic license to bring some interest and detail into the trees so they didn't look flat. The painting is about that dramatic sky but I still wanted the rest of the painting to be interesting.

In this detail shot, you can see that I have more to do on the rock. I added colour and more grass and cracks. To change the "dog" shape, I shaved off some of the top of the rock and extended the tip further into the water. The foreground trees are not reading as trees yet either so I worked on them as well. To push the background trees back I added some blue over top of them.

This is the full unchanged painting.

This is the changed painting and I think the rock looks more like a rock now and the trees are trees and although you can't see it in this photo, I added grass details in the foreground and also added colour to the water. In order to give it some life, I also added some birds.

I'll hang it up somewhere to see if something jumps out at me that needs to be tweeked yet, make the changes and call it done. This one gave me some struggles and I did a lot of procrastinating. Although I am not totally happy with it, I did learn some things along the way.