Using a Cut out to make compositional changes in digital painting

It's easy to make compositional decisions when you can move elements around on the canvas. This is a trick that you can't do in traditional watercolours (it would be too hard to remove the water and mountain where the trees are now.)

Lasso the trees in your original sketch document (this is why you want Iterative Saves- because you can go back to a different point in the painting! Cool eh!)
Copy and paste into your current working version
Use Layer Adjuster Tool to move the trees around in the composition to see where they look best! Consider some basic rules as you do it to guide the process.

There have already been some compositional changes in the sketch. The pine tree between the two birches is gone! What was I thinking?? The shoreline is not angled, and there are more rocks on both shorelines. It is very characteristic of Northern Ontario Lakes to have bays in them and points of land defining the shoreline. I thought the right mountain looked better further back and a small bay in there added some interest and authenticity.

I had taken the trees out earlier because I was having so much trouble with the water and they were distracting me too much! This is a good tip: You can use your Flat Grainy blender to move paint around ie: fill in small areas, extend small areas...I use it for small changes only because too much starts to look obvious there was a different painting method used in that spot. In this case I changed the little rocky point and filled in the area where the trees were. With my paper texture on a separate layer and always there it is fairly easy to blend in these areas.

In the three frames above you can see three changes and underneath why I chose the one I did. I moved the tree layer around with the Layer Adjuster Tool on the toolbar (the solid arrow one on the top left of your toolbar).

Added or should I say subtracted some more branches on the birches in the picture below. I like the shapes they made in between the branches too - less triangular than original version!