Painting Realistic Pine Trees in Oil

I've always wanted to paint something by viewing it in real life instead of looking a picture. My backyard has a awesome landscape with towering aspens and evergreens.

I started by priming the panel with black paint. I sit outside and paint by eye. I leave areas blank where I know the background shines through. Right now I'm just trying to block in the basic shapes.

 The general idea of the painting starts to emerge even if it's a sight for sore eyes.

 This is where the painting starts to take off. I repaint the sky ensuring full coverage. It's already looking much more blue than the previous picture. I work from the farthest object away to the foreground. In this case it is the house. I add in the main components of the house but most of it won't remain visible in the end. Than I paint in the pine trees sculpting the major light and dark areas. I leave a lot of areas dark or empty because they'll be added in when I go back and add detail. The fence receives some details and the aspen trees are started.

 Here you can see the aspen trees start to emerge. I used a flat brush and used a dabbing motion to paint the smallest branches. I wasn't able to get fine enough lines with a pointed brush and this worked really well. I paint in the form with a dark brown and lighten it up slightly. When I add my highlights later I want them to really stand out.

 The highlights began to go on. Immediately the aspen looks much more like the ones in real life. I also start adding in the outline and dark areas of the left most evergreen. This process will be done on the other two.

The front two pine trees are now outlined. Before they belended right in with the background trees. The dark allows them to stand out. 

The darks are added to the other two pine trees. Highlights are added on after the paintings dried for a day. They really help to distinguish the form of the trees and make it look 3D. The two evergreens on the left have a more yellowish green while the ones on the right are more of a bluish tone. The highlights on these blue ones use a lot of white and almost no yellow. 

The foreground recieves some attention in this picture. I go in with a fan brush and do a tapping motion on the grass. This is mostly to break up the plain color it had. I'll go over the grass with even more detailed highlights. Certain blades look almost pure white. 

In this clip I'm applying a glaze of dark dark paint mixed with safflower oil to darken certain sections of the tree. Doing this in select areas brings out a lot of depth.