I REALLY liked the brown forground a lot more than this blue one. It changes the whole image to have such a warm and earthy color grounding the trees, and I quite liked it!
Why not use the blue for detailing the front trunks like in the painting? I'm enjoying your exploration of this whole subject, keep it up! c:
I tweaked the palette some more, pulled down the saturation on some colors, made the grays neutral and fixed some brightness issues. Then I changed around some of the colors(giving you back the brown which you liked) in the tiled trees but that's where I'm abandoning
that image before starting to detail it like the painting. I had already started detailing the front trunks in the first version but I removed all of that again, because I then would have had to detail the other trunks as well and that would have become nearly impossible under the chosen restrictions (also, the image/composition is too boring to fix and I'm thinking of redoing it completely from scratch with less 2D-ish trees(those are especially obvious in the tree tops, which should actually appear like viewed from below instead of the side view they are in) and more curved trunks).
Another
attempt at a painting I also abandoned. The brushes and my skills are not up to do the fine details necessary to make that work at that size. Also, this time I had chosen a really heavy (200g/m?) coated paper meant for inkjet photo prints and the problem with that is that the watercolors don't hold easily on it, due to the coating and it's impossible to paint color over color on that paper because upon applying the next color, the one previously applied dissolves again, leaving unfixable white holes in the painting and the brush just ends up pushing the color away instead of it sinking into and staying on the paper. Another problem is that the pencil lines, drawn for planning what goes where, are too strong and they show through the paint. This whole painting was a rather frustrating experience.
