Painting with Plantie Tuesday! #9 - Background Forest

Hey everyone! Yay! I am so glad to be back :D
I have had the stomach flu since a week ago, and hadnt been painting or well. moving very much if I could help it :P
But it felt so good today to get back to painting on a new foresty canvas ^^
Today for Painting with Planties I wanted to show you quickly the first 2 layers that would go into a forest further into the background!

Hope you enjoy and let me know if you have any questions, tips or comments!

this was as far as i got during the fu- those were angry sick trees :P

Here we go! This painting will be another dark forest scene, like Rebirth, but with cooler tones to it. I started off with the gradiant light sources in the back, blending with glazing liquid straight on the masonite board.

i can never keep anything clean.

 For the background I mainly used my old acrylics - the standard Galeria ones. I made the mistake of using my nice Open colors on Waiting to Fly for the background and pretty much destroyed the white and blue tubes I had. Not going to happen again! :P
We have here - Hooker's Green, Cadmium Yellow, Titanium White, Prussian Blue Hue, Burnt Umber, Lamp Black, Payne's Grey (the only Golden Open color I used) and Cobalt Blue....

those are quite some tilty pine trees.

Since I can never draw or paint a straight line. This is what my furtherest away trees look like lol. I used the same colors for the lightest part of the gradiant and added some more blue and black for the color of the trees. Then I added a bit more and made darker trees on the outside.

no this is not straight black! Paynes Grey, Prussian Blue, and a little Lamp Black

I added then the darker trees, the ones that will appear to be closer to the viewer. This is after several attempts of trying to make them look not so gnobbly but I figured hey. Its nature. Itll always be perfectly flawed :3

fan brush ftw!

Now - its time to create foliage. And because I know otherwise I could be spent bent painting thousands of non-existant leaves, I use a fan brush and plop down the illusion of foliage in the distance. I use the same color as the dark trees, but also mixing it with a teeny tiny bit of white for some varying tones closer to the bottom.

the effect from afar

Adding only a few solid lines for branches, I fill in the whole area with foliage to create proper looking pine-esque trees in the distance!

zoomed in a bit

I also darkened the grass around the trees as it should be close to black but I am just working my nerve up to that now.
From here, I will add more gradual layers of trees with varying amounts of detail to them to create a sense of depth in this night forest scene.

Thanks everyone for stopping by!
Hope everyone has had a great Easter holiday weekend and are settling back into the work week ^^
Till then ~