My Many Versions Of My Final Piece

After I felt like I had created a substantial image to be used as my final piece, there were a few parts of the image which I were unsure about. To get other people's impressions on these little details, I asked for advice from a number of different artists and class mates what they thought about my piece of work and the select areas.

This was the image that I presented to them:

The points that I asked them on were - The tree in the top left hand corner, The building mid-left and the lighting of the image (whether or not it was too dark and the shadows were too intense)

I had a number of mixed responses, some of which I agreed with, others I did not. I posted the picture on my Flickr and although I got feedback, nothing was very constructive...

The feedback from my classmates and some artists however was much more constructive. They said that the tree takes away the whole negative space of the sky and gets in the way as such. Others said that the tree distracts from the car as it is surrounded by the white of the sky and the harsh contrast draws in their eye. Whereas others said that they liked the tree being there as it fills up the space left by the sky. With this information on board, I went about removing the tree.

To remove the tree I used the clone stamp tool and painted over the tree with areas of clouds.

As you can see from the image, my first attempt at this went a little wrong. None the less it was easily fixed as all it needed was some spot healing to blend in the clouds and make it look natural. 

Now the tree was gone, I could see that it looked much better and the use of negative space in the background made the contrast between the foreground even stronger and powerful. 

As regards to the building, I did remove it (using the same method, but replacing it with the bush) and I personally felt that the image looked too photoshopped and unnatural. 

In conclusion, I decided that for my final 10 hour piece I would be submitting the version of my picture that has no tree in it.