Making backgrounds to practice trees

After a long hiatus of looking at the drying canvas in the house, I decided to try to practice trees.  I created two backgrounds in acrylic.

Swamp Background - used palette knife

Flower Background - used small brushes

What's interesting is that 4 months ago, I would have been too scared to try to draw skies or anything at all!  Now, I'm letting this dry to try to paint the trees and picking out a few youtubes to follow.

The left tree got mushy, I have to slow down.  The right tree is, um, interesting.

This turned from a poppy field into mud, but provided a nice background for the below

Finally a decent tree - thanks to YouTube