I found a cable I needed to get a photo onto the computer, so here's the third session of painting on the pond painting. I made some progress today, but I also fought myself back and forth a great deal, which wasted time.
For one thing, during the second under-painting session I had put in a small tree to the right of the pond. It is visible in the scan I made of the lower right corner for May 27. I need something bringing the eye back into the canvas from the right, so I decided to include one of the low limbs of a magnolia that is there, but whose limbs don't reach quite that far. That made the small tree visually confusing, so I painted it back out, but I didn't get around to painting the magnolia limb back in yet.
A second battle ground was the second set of plants in the back of the pond. There are arrow leaved plants (probably hyacinth) growing out of the water, and young wild sunflower plants growing behind them. The two did not have sufficiently distinct foliage, which was also visually confusing, and the rather stiff ungainly form of the sunflower plants was unattractive. I've painted them out with a dark area over which I'll paint the forsythia that grows behind the sunflowers.
Aside from those two cases of back-tracking, I added detail pretty much all over, but still haven't established the main areas of value... oddly, the details are going in and since they'll comprise the lights and darks, the composition will be built with them. I'd generally start the other way around. Hmmm.
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