I finally got all the hills looking pretty much the way I want them to, and moved into the finishing touches stage on all three panels, and for the last week I've been working on the clouds. I saw two problems with them, the first being that the clouds in #3 really didn't add anything to the composition. Panel #3, the right-most end, isn't the focal center of the painting anyway, but I didn't want it to be just an add-on, I needed it to have something in it that would catch the eye and be interesting to look at. Otherwise, why have it? Since the cloud area is where I have the most freedom to improvise, I decided to add an interesting cloud pattern that would draw the eye out all the way to the edge if one happened to be looking at that side of the painting.
Once I got that roughed in I went through all the panels, adding more color detail in the clouds—more colors, more combining colors by glazing the predominant tones by layering each over the others—purple over orange, yellow over orange, and orange over purple and yellow. This doesn't really show up in the photo, but in person it makes the colors look richer and a lot more varied. You can paint in subtle color shifts with a thin glaze that support the 3-D look of shapes. I was using my large flat and bright brushes, a couple different kinds but all with synthetic hairs. The ones I used are fairly soft as brushes go, but I couldn't keep from getting the paint on unevenly and leaving more surface texture than I really wanted in the finer areas. I was getting more frustrated by that because I knew I've gotten a smoother look in many previous paintings, and that's what I want in this painting—a minimum of visible brushstrokes and a maximum of smooth shapes and edges.
Then a few days ago without thinking why, I picked up a different brush, a large filbert Winsor & Newton Eclipse series, which is made of fitch hair, or "black sable". I have a few of them I bought years ago, they're actually for oils, but they work great with acrylics and I've used small ones in a number of landscapes to paint leaves. As soon as I started painting with it I knew this was the answer I was looking for. Fitch hairs are so much softer than synthetic fibers, I can make beautiful unbroken, consistent washes of even thinned-out paint, and because they hold so much paint it's easy to get a nice smooth edge line, or a more smoothly-graded wash. In addition, the softness makes it easier to work wet-over-damp without disturbing the layer beneath, which saves a lot of standing around and thumb-twiddling waiting for a brushstroke to dry.
I looked over the web to see if I could find an even bigger Winsor & Newton fitch brush, and probably because they come from real animals they're quite pricey, not as bad as sable but way more expensive than the White Wonder or Softgrip brushes I use a lot of. I also found none of the big discount sellers even have the #14 I have, and W & N themselves were out of stock on anything that big or bigger. So I looked on Blick again and they do have their own line of fitches, including larger brushes, at a considerable savings over the W & N ones.
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