A new pastel painting - african sunset

Wow, another post already; things may be looking up. On the other habd I did not want to leave the decorated egg as my top post, LOL. this is a piece i did at my weekly art group last Tuesday. I am still concentrating on pastel and particularly on limited palette works. This was one of the african sunset atc's ( watercolour) which you may remember I did recently. I have enlarged the format, this is now an A4 painting and used a very much stonger colour set. One of the things I love about pastel is the quality of the colours it is possible to achieve. I think this can be misinterpreted as I have used such a luscious purple for the cloud top. It looks like an horizon and even could be seen as the sea but it is definitely not either and the setting sun should give the clue here. The source image for this painting did show the sun as an almost complete circle broken only by the foliage. I am not a meteorologist so cannot explain why the sun appears to be in front of the cloud bank. Anyway I am very pleased with the piece if I do not stop to try and explain it all.

It is simply an image of the sky as the sun sets seen over a drift of trees. The trees were painted firstly in the lighter green seen at the top level and then overlayed with a dark olive green and lastly with black to get the right depth of colour.

A larger image can be seen on my Flickr photostream. Well that feels better, hope you like it and thanks for looking.