Painting Bark

In our art class, the instructor wants us to produce three examples of "winter textures" that are good enough to frame.














 One of them is to be an example of bark.

For that painting, I have painted two branches I found on the ground in our neighborhood - one from a pine tree and the other from a willow.

When I took my painting to class, our instructor, Kerri, suggested intensifying the darkness at the bottom of the bark, to make it look rounder...

I'm satisfied with the look of the bark, but I'm not happy with the green pine needles. They need to look round and glossy - but I don't know how to create that texture. Maybe I need to add a little dark "shadow-side" to a few to give them a 3-dimentional look. As one of my previous instructors told us, realistic paintings are optical illusion... and details are important in creating the illusions.

(There is so much to learn!)