Final steps for Rainbow Forest 2

So progress has been slow, I can't quite see what's wrong exactly but I've been faffing around with it a lot, circling around the problems and chipping away at them. 

I can't remember if I mentioned this when I was working on 'a light in the dark' but I found out a really useful technique for masking fluid. I used it in the above photo. First of all I stripped the paint off (at the bottom of the trees and the edges of the foreground leaves) as much as I could by scrubbing at it with a brush and water, then dabbing it off with toilet paper. Once I got as much of the paint off that way as I could I let it dry and then put masking fluid down over those arias. I don't rub the masking fluid in but I'm not being extremely careful with the masking fluid either. When I peel it off it's taken off a bit more of the paint underneath as well.... However, you have to be so so careful not to peel some of the paper off as well. If you rub the masking fluid in at all then you're going to find it really really hard.

I also started to add in some grass in the foreground, that was fun and satisfyingly easy, just had to make sure the brush strokes didn't get too thick and slowly build them up. 

I'd say I've more or less finished it now, but I didn't get a good photo of it. Tomorrow when it's sunny I'll replace the photo here and upload it to DeviantArt and Facebook. 

The last bits of work were going over the white grass in front of the trees with some green and then working on adding even more grass in front of the trees...mostly because the trees were still too detached from the ground, adding more grass in front helped root them in. 

Then adding a bit of pink to the foreground trees, just to blend them in to everything a bit more, but then I had to add more bark texture onto those pink arias. 

The last bit, and the bit I'm still not completely sure if I'm finished, is adding more pinks and purples to the foreground trees and working on adding some sort of transition between the foreground leaves and the grass behind them. It's sort of working but to be honest I'm not sure how much more I could do with watercolour to fix it, adding too much will just add a dark ring around them.

So this is the original rainbow forest. There's things I did better, and things I did worse comparing them.
Composition wise the new one is far better, it's also a lot more like a finished piece of art where the old one was more of a test/messing around with watercolour. 

The bads however.... I really liked how I did the leaves the first time around. having the light going through them was really nice and I didn't really manage to replicate that, mostly because the angle's different so you can see leaves in the background as well which then make the foreground ones lack that light behind them....I donno, there might have been a way to do it but I didn't manage to keep it. 

The other place I messed up in....something I should have known from the start: Was using too many from the tube colours. 

Ideally I should have just had a red, yellow and blue, then mixed the other colours I needed from those three. Now I find it a nightmare to make purples so best for me would probably be to add a pink to those three so I can make an easy purple with the pink and the blue.... However, I had added a purple, a orange and a green to that mix, turning my ideal four tubes of paint to a seven. 

So why does it matter...Hmm, say you had a sky blue and an orange-ish red. If you mix the two you won't get a purple, it will be closer to a brown because there's yellow in the red. But what you will get is a clear transition between the blue to the red, that brown colour will look all right next to either the blue or the red because it contains those colours. 

What I did instead though was having my blue, having my red and then just picking a purple that I had no idea what other colours were mixed in the tube to make. So that purple didn't sit well with the blue or the red exactly. What I should have done was pick a neither warm or cold blue (so I can still get it to make warm greens) and then picked a cold red or a pink to get my purples.

To be honest the purples aren't the best example, since I'd want both a red and a pink anyway, but they are the clearest. It's easy to see when you mix a red and a blue and it fails to make purple...I don't know if I could describe it as easily by saying a blue and a yellow made the wrong green.

In my new painting however I'd say the biggest problem is that the blue doesn't tie in that well. I didn't go from the blue to the pink or yellow to make my purples and greens, so it stands out and doesn't make a nice transition with those colours. 

Ah well, the lesson I already knew has been hammered into my skull with this painting, let’s hope I don't forget it again. I just hope the person I'm painting this for likes it...