This is my first painting in a long while. I used white and black paint only for this which made it easy to mix compatible colors but harder to distinguish different elements on the canvas.

I also practiced a receding ridge line in this painting, as seen previously in Northern California Coast at Night. If you look at any Bob Ross painting you'll notice the hills and mountains are totally perpendicular to the viewer. They never look along a valley or along a ridge or anything like that. This makes them simple to paint but it's really limiting if you want to recreate real places. To make the ridge recede into the distance I used light values in the distance and gradually darkened it coming forward, while also increasing the size and detail of the textures as I worked towards the foreground.

The big tree was originally going to be some kind of evergreen which is why the trunk is so straight.