This started off as a speed painting, ended up finishing it off to be more of a matte painting (total of 4 hours of painting over a few days).

A few words on the technique. This is based on a photograph my wife took, I decided to paint this all by hand rather than doing some sort of photomanip (it's good practice), using the photo simply as reference. The only photo used in the actual painting are the two photoshop tree brushes, which I created by taking real photos of 2 trees against the sky, making them greyscale, and then contrasting the heck out of them. 99% of the image is the three brushes below.



May I say that painting clouds is both fun and incredibly frustrating. But I'm happy to get the practice in.