Making The Visit - Backgrounds

I've been puttering around with this background because I think it's going in the right direction. A few more pine trees have appeared just over the ridge. I also took out the fog layer that was making everything too pale. This is not a large development but it comes on the heels of looking at some old paintings of winter landscapes. There are two Dutch painters who have given me confidence that winter landscapes can indeed be drawn. The painters are Hendrick Avercamp and Pieter Bruegel. There's a Scottish painter named Joseph Farquharson that I've been looking at also. The point is not to copy other paintings but to notice how those painters solved problems like groups of trees in the distance, or bare branches, or how snow looks as it covers the distant ground, or how you can draw things that make no sense at all and everything still ends up looking just right. It's also good to notice how messy paintings can be.