Progress on the Tuscan Hay painting

As is typical of my working method, I establish my sky and clouds first on my newly sketched canvas. This helps me to key the rest of my light values in the painting. At this point I also  lay in a first pass on the distant mountain.

Next come the hill town and terraced hillside of the background. At this point I am still establishing the compositional elements so there is not much color or value variation. I will go back into these areas again, but I really want to develop the entire canvas to the same level before it sets up too much, as I'm not sure when my next painting session will be.

Now for the middle distance, where my area of interest (the house) resides. I decided to lower the cypress to the right of the house, as I felt there needed to be some height/shape variation in the trees flanking the house.  I'll have to go back into that sky area again where I made this change to clean it up a little more. Good thing I still have plenty of that sky color on my palette! Again, I don't have much in the way of highlights yet...just a few value shifts to give certain objects a little form.

Now I'm ready to start laying in the foreground hill and those groovy hay tracks.

That was fun! Now I have the whole canvas covered more or less to the same level of finish. There's a good deal more to do, but this feels like a pretty good start for around 4 hours of work.