Oil Paintings (II) - Albert Bierstadt

Here i present an exercise i did using one of the most known works of the hudson river school. It's Albert Bierstadt this time if i recall correctly.

Quite challenging for me. Here the difficulty relied on several parts. 

First all the tiny details and vegetation in the foreground. Ended up mixing several different colors and brush strokes to convey that feel of mixed thin grass leaves of different types and the ocres and less saturated colors of the stones and grains.

Then the feel of old bricks in the right facade that is being eaten by nature little by little and like specially the yellow highlights of the grass in it's top part. Im quite happy with the colors and the texture.

The sky was the first thing to do since i try to work from background to foreground, thus covering layers. The clouds, pastel-ish atmosphere of the original painting here was certainly difficult for me, specially if we take into account the hard times i had in a previous  exercise where i was painting huge sky sunrise where the primarily light was hitting on a backlit inmense set of clouds. Really happy how it turned out this time.

At last, the background mountains where we can see three major depth planes, each one more and more whitewashed. I had difficulties trying to get and match the middle toned colors of the set of mountains in the middle plane since there where an inbetween of the almost like sky colors of the mountains at the back and the more saturated ones closer to the viewer. I put several layers of mixed oils until i finally got the desired, something in between, atmosphere.