Landscape

So, surprise surprise, I don't have final pictures for my landscape drawing. And, surprise surprise, I don't think it's that great. But, let's talk about it, shall we?

First rough draft 

Rough draft with brown chalk pencil 

Beginning of final 

Day like 3 of final 

Day 4 of final 

In my defense, this piece of paper is like, two feet by a 18 inches. Which is a tremendous amount of space to work with. Also, I didn't really know what I was doing with foliage, as is probably obvious.
    The media for this is white and black charcoal with chalk pastel pencils on brown colored paper, in case you were wondering.
   What I wanted was for the brown of the paper to be the middle tone, and for the white charcoal to demarcate highlights.  Of course, the color range was eventually expanded because the amount of depth I would be able to get out of those to components was questionable, so two different shades of brown and black were added, as was gray.
    I think I made two big mistakes. The first being the black in the foliage. It's much too overpowering, and really detracts from the entire scene.  Possibly, I should have left out black all together. Secondly, I forgot that there were actual places where you could see the sky, and so had to color those the lightest possible color, white, which really threw the highlights of the trees out of whack.
     To top it all off, using the paper as a medium value left a lot of blank spaces on the paper, without any real depth. I'm going to have to revisit this piece and figure out how to make it more cohesive and how to give it more depth before submitting my final.