Tree and Hillside (Oil Bar Painting as of January 28, 2015)

Here is my oil bar painting as it looked after I worked on it this morning. This landscape is based on photos that I took in October at Appleton Farms, in Ipswich, MA. (You can see my reference photos posted here on January 2nd and 3rd.) I am still establishing the composition, and today I worked on the lines of the hillside and roughed in the stand of trees in the background. The big tree on the left is not finished, but it is much more developed than the rest of the canvas. And I can remember my painting teachers telling me not to spend too much time on one part of the painting before roughing in the whole composition. I usually try to follow that advice, but in this case, I knew that if that big tree didn't work, the painting wouldn't work either. So I concentrated on that tree until I was convinced that I would be able to paint it.