Changing the composition

The previous image was starting to make me feel uncomfortable with how much space the hill was occupying compared to the sky, and still the shadows looked too dark. So I decided to go back to the studies I'd done in the sketchbook, which had been produced as the sun was rising, so there were three different images with three different shadow patterns, and I decided to work with the latter of the images, which had the greater area of sunlit grass, but still showed the shadows created by the contours in the mountain.

Lowering the line of the hill caused problems because I'd used such thick paint for the hill side, it was now showing as unwanted textured areas in the sky, which you can just about make out in the photo here. I spent a while adding more paint to the rough area of the sky to try and blend it in with the smooth ares, and even though it took quite a few applications of paint it worked out quite well and is now almost imperceptable.

The lighter areas of the grass are now much more successful and not so oppressive, and I really like the way that using the brush (my new hogs hair brush!) to paint on top of the darker areas has created a really interesting effect, one that I wanted to keep and utilise, as to me it suggested the blowing of the wind and the rippling of the grass.