"Blue Sky, Orange Tree"

I've been working on my painting, "Blue Sky, Orange Tree", since late spring.  I started this while painting in our pasture one evening, as the sun raked sideways across the field.  The 'orange' of the tree is the sun light, not the tree itself.

Currently, I'm trying to bring out the sense of evening light catching the woods, coming in from the right.  But first I had to tame down too much color in the woods.  Initially I used translucent paint to allow the canvas to come through - like on the orange tree - but the rest of the woods was a translucent red which was over powering.  It needed to be toned down to set off the orange tree.  So then I did the hard step of using an opaque paint to cover over the red, making the background trees a neutral gray, quieting the other areas.  This morning I'm coming back with more of the accents of the light in those trees, using burnt sienna and purples.

I like the effect in the woods, but now I'm trying to resolve the foreground, and I keep feeling that the left hand side of the woods drops down too much. I want to raise it up and then get the 'catch' of light coming along that flat plane.