Landscape

This piece is the first landscape that I've ever tried to paint. They're olive trees which I painted for my friend's mom to hang up in their house. 

This is painted with acrylics on canvas, and its 12 x 24. I really like the way that the light is coming in and how the leaves turned out, and even though you can't in the picture there is a lot of texture on the canvas. It took more than a couple layers of paint to get it that way though, and a few weeks to complete this piece. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out though, and I really hope that the family I'm giving it to likes it! 

I often start pieces off in sections, and then go over them in layers. I noticed while painting this piece, I tend to forget that I'm going to be putting a couple layers of everything down anyway and I spend a lot of time in even the preliminary stages when all I really need to do is throw some greenish color down and get a feel for where everything is going to be on the canvas. I get too focused on the details. 

I tried using a fan brush to paint the grass, but it just didn't come out looking very realistic. So I switched to using just a very small brush and painting on each leaf. It took a lot longer, but when you compare the pictures it looks a lot better.