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In Times Gone By Part Two a digital watercolour in progress by Joan A Hamilton In Times Gone By Part Two: I wanted more light and space to show between the branches, so I used a Pointed Simple Water brush with the brush slightly squeezed to paint tiny branches in varying colours of green with a brown trunk showing in places.
Sorry I didn't get back to this until today. Meanwhile I have painted the sky and trees multiple times (really multiple lol!) As you can see the trees look quite different than I had painted them in Part One
 As you can see the texture layer I applied earlier is still showing even though I blended and softened parts of the branches with a custom digital watercolour blender.
I painted the sky over many times trying different watercolour washes and finally ended up using John Derry's brushes again. The technique is the same as in Part One, except I used the Wet Blender on the Preserve Transparency layer rather than the Wet Rough. The following is a view of the the first stage of the sky.
 John Derry's Watercolour brush set is great for this because his Captured Dabs give those cool jagged edges. I haven't done any blending or diffusing on these two layers yet. I will have to because the tiny spots around some of the edges aren't consistent with what clouds look like (to me anyway)! I seem to be missing a horizon line.
 Steps Used to Paint Horizon Trees:
Now I have to work on the sky and do some blending and diffusing. I will be trying to make it very subtle again and not overdo it or I will lose my cloud edges and I want to keep some of them fairly defined. I used a Digital Watercolour Soft diffused brush and am working on the Blue area of the sky layer first.
I have just shown a small portion of the area blended so far in the view below.
 Further Brush Controls for Soft Diffused brush to do some blending in the sky
 The next step is to add more colour and do blending in the sky. I try to remember that the mood is supposed to be somewhat somber...so the grey clouds need to be more threatening!
I want to just add a little wet diffused grey to the grey cloud layer.
June 27, 2010 I have been painting this for nearly a week and have redone each element numerous times.
The final version has two Blue Jays that I painted another time added to it. It looked like any old barn painting without them. Somehow they seem to add to the story and make the image more interesting. They also change the eye movement through the painting. There were getting to be too many jagged lines in a row going across the page. The blue jays help break that up.
Here is the field area as it looked at one point. I scrapped it.
 Next I tried painting in the long grass in layers, using much brighter greens so I could vary them more and brighten things up a bit. This is a technique dependent on two custom brushes which are easy to make.
 The first brush is a variation of a Flat Grainy Blender with the properties altered to digital watercolour and unsaturated so that you can pull the paint from one area to another. This is the way I did the negative painting here to suggest long grass. I also used a very soft blender changed to a digital watercolour as well. You could also drop and dry the digital watercolour layer and use regular belenders to achieve this, but I prefer to keep this as a digital watercolour layer for now.
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Judith said:
This is just amazing how beautiful. I love how you explained it so carefully and detailed. This is a real work of art and one of my favorites...they really are all one of my favorites, ha. But my husband and I agree this is exceptionally beautiful. To see it go from a sketch to a beautiful painting is exciting. Thanks for the adventure.
Judith