Harvard Gulch Alley-Work in Progress

This may be disconcerting, but I wanted the most recent version on top of the blog post, so the progression of the painting itself is going backwards; start at the bottom of the post if you want it in order.

Here is where I left off yesterday afternoon. I spent more time playing with the light and dark pattern of the main body of trees. I tidied up the dumpsters and fine tuned the recycling bins going down the alley. There is a 50's car hiding out down the alley that I also tidied up. I will see about a close up of that area, but it is located just about dead center. I worked on correcting the fence colors and values, although I did not complete all of them. I lightened the red shed but darkened the roof of it and the roof of the house behind it in preparation of adding lighter color and value to add texture to the shingles. While doing that I carved out the top of the fence posts. I also toned down that bright ochre color on the fence by the red shed as it was starting to be distracting.
This is number 2 from the blockin and here I decided to take some of the evergreen out while going over the sky color with a darker blue. felt that the painting was feeling top heavy. I added the cast shadow to the roof of one of the garages to bring the branches into more of a complete circle, so to speak.

On the right hand side, I darken up those trees and gave them some shape as well as lightening the roof of the garage and lightening the side of the yellow garagae facing us. They both needed to be lighter than the sky. From the original blockin, I started on the mass of the tree tops. I knew the values weren't correct and I wanted to get some color in there. There is a contorted evergreen behind the deciduous trees that creates a back ground for the branches. I wanted to unite that with the darker brush of the trees going down the alley and the darkest parts of the tree trunks. I also worked on uniting the shadow shapes throughout as some of them were too light and to get the relational values to work, I needed a starting point of the darkest value. I should have done this in the blockin, but for some reason, I hardly ever manage to do it, concentrating first on the shapes with approximate color and value depending on whether I think I will want the lighter color coming through the next layer or the darker.