Development of a new acrylic painting

I decided to work "large" with this latest piece, all of 8 inches by 6 inches - well at twice as large as my post cards, it is large as far as my last few weeks are concerned. Quite honestly I was looking for some card to continue with the post-card sized theme and came across a couple of slightly larger (but quite thick) pieces. Not wanting the bother of cutting these, I decided to use them as they were.

First of all, I prepared the surfaces with an acrylic gesso. The miniatures had been painted with quite "wet" paint, the acrylic had been diluted so that I could work wet-into-wet as if with watercolour. This time I was going to work with paint straight out of the tubes to try and get a textured effect. This was because the reference photo I had chosen was a photo of an oil painting from an old art magazine, and I wanted to try to achieve the same effect. I did not want the paint sinking into the surface of the card.

The painting I had chosen to work with, was from a 1998 (?) copy of The Artist/writer was Edward Noott. A scene of springtime daffodils growing in profusion at the edge of a road (?) with hedges and hills in a distant background. Here is a poor photograph of the painting from the magazine.

In this sort of subject, well in most subjects really, I like to paint the background first and then add the details in the foreground. In this way the background can be seen through the foreground subjects and I do not have to consider what I should do in the gaps - assuming there will be some.

My background looked like this:-

Not exactly a copy but that is how I work. I take the main elements from the reference and "do my own thing" with them. Not too sure it is exactly what I had in mind but good enough to work over at the group meeting next week.

Incidentally, a few of my colleagues thought that it was worth leaving it as it is - I suppose it does have a simple symmetry with a bright and airy feeling, but I shall finish what I have started. Hope to be posting the results next week.