Art Journey Journal: First paint with gouache

I previously thought I had filmed a time lapse of painting this piece and was going to share my journey with painting it, but realized I misremembered and there is no time lapse or recording to be found. So I'll write here a bit about the process and learnings behind this piece.

I have not painted with gouache much before, and the few times I have, I have used it like watercolors. I painted this before watching some videos on how to use gouache because I mainly wanted to experiment and play with it first. Anyway, given my recent art journey and doing a deep dive into all things art and developing my skill, I wanted to give a landscape a try.

Drawing and painting landscapes have always intimidated me. There is so much going on in a landscape. Before I started learning to decipher a composition based only on my recent art journey, I would immediately get overwhelmed by the details. All the plants close up, all the plants in the distance. How on earth would I be able to paint all that detail? And I mean detail up to the leaves on every single tree. This means when I saw people successfully paint landscape and essentially somehow simplify a complex environment into a cohesive beautiful piece...I always wondered how.

I've since learned to breakdown a landscape into background, mid-ground, and foreground as well as observe some tactics other artists put into simplifying mountains and trees. I hadn't painted a landscape in a while, let alone with traditional media, so I was able to apply some of the theory I had learned and was pretty happy with the result in that I created some depth. Everything else though was an experiment and learning in the process!

Reference Photo:

Things I tried and lessons learned: