Two more progress stages today. Having considered the painting overnight and looking at it with fresh eyes this morning, I decided two make two compositional changes from my original plan; firstly, to extend the beach further left, and secondly, to stop the background trees from descending below the horizontal branch. There were two reasons for this; firstly, to create a definite middle ground, and secondly the triangle shape formed by the beach points towards the kookaburra on the left, leading the eye there (the other kooka is framed by the tree shapes).
So with that in mind, I painted in the extended beach and the middleground shrubbery;
I will probably adjust some of the tones in the water, sand and shrubbery, but not until everything else is painted so I can better judge what's needed.
Having done that, I dried the painting (up to now, everything was wet, and more than once I stuck my thumb in it!), and then painted in the two foreground branches - great fun using loads of paint on the knife in a very textural manner;
And when I say loads of paint (the proper term is "impasto") ... here's a photo taken from side-on looking along the main horizontal branch - you can see the paint is just about as thick as real bark! Thank goodness I'm using Genesis, which dries in minutes, as if I was doing this with real oils it would takes weeks to dry.
I will leave painting the birds for tomorrow as the light is already fading thanks to these short winter days.
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