Had fun painting "french fields" in watercolour for the bright background working light to dark in a traditional watercolour manner and then painting the foreground dark to light like you would an oil painting but using gouache which is basically opaque watercolour. A few sections of this painting could be compositions in their own right.
For the background I used Gaston Balande's work
"view of the village of lauzières with the house of balande" recently sold at auction in France. I printed it out, its an oil shown below and on my work in progress.