Painting 50: Spring sunshine, Orleans House Woods

Oil painting on panel 5x7". Available from Newbloodart online gallery

If you're already following me on Instagram then you may have seen this painting there, which I painted back in March.  I was fooled by looking out at  the strong sunshine into thinking it would be warm, but there was a bitter easterly breeze which really froze my fingers by the end of it.

Last time I painted this subject in Orleans House Woods, was in January, and I was painting with the sun behind me. I opted to paint into the sun this time as I loved the light streaming through the green foliage on the ground.
Now - surely you can't paint spring without a fair amount of bright green,  I actually went crazy and used a bit of pthalo green for this painting (for those of you who haven't used it it's  a scarily highly pigmented green which can easily contaminate all your colours if you leave just a tiny bit on your brush!). 

Painting trees is time consuming, and I ran out of time to complete this outdoors, so finished off the left hand trees at home from memory.