Closeup horsehead and trees

So if you look at this in full view I think you can see the brushstrokes used to make the trees and the horses head.

The tree strokes look like a lot larger brush partial due to the fact I enlarged the trees in general as they look 'off' in comparison to the horse. I used between a 3 - 15 brushsize, opacity 7 - 25% on the leaves and pretty much scribled and dotted and tried to draw leaf shapes like the photograph (my photograph of tree I have on my land). I layed down the dark colors first and in some places erased where ther ewere breaks in the trees and you can see the sky. All the trees are one layer - the sky is anther layer. I am sure it would be easier to draw the seperate leaf colors in seperate layers, but for some reason and I like to paint them up on one layer I supposed as a connection to my traditional roots.

So like everything I lay down the base colors - usually a few shades up from the darkest. Then I scrible my dark patches over top. Any branches get added at this point - shadow and highlighted side. Then I dashed and dotted with short scribbles the leaves - using a wide variety of colors and never worrying about matching colors too much - but starting dark colors - especially over the tree branchs and going lighter. Kind of free form but using the reference for ideas on dark and light spot relations, the direction of branches, and the general shapes of the leaves.

This is the first time I have done this level ofdetail on trees - but as you can see the leaves are not necessarily paint individually - but scribled in I guess to give the texture.