Another landscape with reworked sky

Plein air painting featuring a solitary tree with fall foliage set against the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains

This is another landscape study with a re-worked sky.  I broke up the flat expanse of blue sky by adding in some cloud formations which were there in real life, but had been omitted when I first painted this scene.  The underlying gradation of value and chroma in the sky gives a very realistic look.

I also re-worked the main tree to give it better form and make it feel less dense.  Slightly lighter values at the crown as well as a touch of blue in the shadows helped create a sense of three-dimensionality.

The foreground was painted in a total of three layers.  I worked back and forth with color until finding a look that let the tree be the center of attention.


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