Painting sky holes in trees

And there is variation - not just from the sky at the zenith, which you would expect, but variation between the intensity of the surrounding sky and the sky-holes: it's not intensely different, but it's also not the bright blue that you find represented in some paintings either. This isn't an original observation I've just made up to be awkward, by the way ...... It's been noted before. So long as your gaps in foliage don't give the impression of a more vibrant blue (or whatever) than the surrounding sky, and don't compete with the tone of the tree colour itself, you're not likely to go far wrong. A hint - you can take some paintings and reduce them to greyscale - or sepia, or whatever. Depending on context - ie if you've not gone for a particular effect to show light streaming through the leaves - you should see sky-holes that are neither far brighter than the tone of the tree's leaves nor, obviously, indiscernible. It's only a small thing Sylvia - and you get it right anyway, through your experience of looking at what you're painting.

For a simple hole in a tree, this is dragging on forever. There could be certain factors that change the colour, such as branches as Robert has mentioned. However, they can't be anything but the same colour. This doesn't always look right though, they tend to stand out, so I find by knocking it back tonally (say by adding a touch of Raw Sienna) does the trick nicely.

Naturally it is dependent on the kind of tree, but you know how when you squint everything gets a bit darker, well that's because you are allowing less light into the eye. If you look at the sky with nothing between you and the sky you get the full brightness of it, if less light is allowed into you eye because there is a mass of foliage in the way blocking some of the light it is naturally going to appear darker. Each tree will do this differently, a fir tree at a distance you won't be able to discern the individual needles but looking between them is going to lessen the amount of light considerably, twigs, berries and small leaves also. Perhaps other tree's with larger leafs may have different effect but also it will be effected by the distance from the tree, the brightness of the sky, the direction of the light and the size of the leafs. The of course you have the brain playing tricks on you, we know that the same grey in a dark area looks different to in a light area. The following image the center squares are all the same value yet look different because of what is around them. My next painting will have sky holes which will be soft focus and I will attempt to give them a kind of lens flare that you get when light is particularly bright and is reflecting off your eye but since there will not be any open sky no comparison can be made.