Starting to paint

The finished sketch, I ended up having to number the layers of trees...then add shapes along with the numbers to tell what branches belonged to what trees. 

To be honest I'm not much of a landscape person, I can enjoy looking at them but painting landscapes from real life always frustrates me and It takes a lot of work to create something from imagination when it comes to landscape, my imagination turns into this thick soup I have to pull a landscape out of. Drawing from pictures is fine but boring. What I did here was probably the best: half imagination and half reference.

I started off painting from the lightest aria: Winsor Yellow, Magenta and Quinacridone Sienna. I've kept everything really light for now since I don't know how dark the foreground will be.

I started to add some Perylene Red and Permanent Mauve, just trying to soften the hard line from foreground and background. Later I realised it was way too detailed in the background and I tried to smooth it out a bit. I also started to add in the background trees, they slowly change from Winsor Yellow to Winsor green to Phthalo Blue, I'll add some Permanent Mauve to the ones in the foreground.

I've been listening to One Fantastic Week on Youtube and I have to recommend it, and its Facebook group. They've both been extremely useful and insightful.
The Youtube channel is brilliant for listening to talks by other artists about art and about trying to make money through art, there's a lot of different people's knowledge there and sometimes they do talks on a particular subject instead of the more interview like other ones.
The Facebook group is a brilliant place to ask questions to other artists from how to use something to the best way of packaging a painting and sending it to someone. What most people use it for though is a place to get critique on the paintings they're currently working on and for that it's fantastic...harsh, but really useful.