Alla Prima copy of William Whitaker's Spring Tree

Today's art (disaster) is a pretty poor attempt at an alla prima copy of William Whitaker's painting "Spring Tree."  Mine is painted on canvas board in oil.  The canvas was primed with light gray gesso.  Starting out I coated the whole canvas in a yellow ochre ground, then put in the hill/mountain area and the first pass on the sky.  Then painted in the sun lit field in the background, then put in some of my green tones.

I'm unhappy with the foreground, mainly because by the time I started putting in detail, I'd already been painting for over 2 hours and decided to rush through so I could clean up before it got too late.   Start to finish was about 3 hours, that includes preparing a palette and clean up.

I think my biggest problems with this attempt was that I failed to capture the same feeling of sunlight, the sense of depth, and I let myself work some areas of the paint far too much.  I'm still getting used to alla prima and mixing colors not only on the palette, but having them mix as I paint wet into wet on the canvas.