Gisele,
I am definitely not a landscape painter. However, I can offer some information from John E. Carlson,
"Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting", page 57:
Quote:
if one were to hold up a piece of mosquito netting against a light surface (the sky) it would be noticed that when viewed from a distance of fifteen feet the actual warp and woof of the netting is not visible, but instead the whole piece looks like a flat light-grey mass, darker as whole than the sky. This is caused by the phenomenon...that of darks losing their intensity when put against a light, and the new phenomenon of the light losing its brilliance when filtered through a dark mass.
We shall now consider the light of the sky as it touches the edge of the trees, or comes in through it in more or less different sized "holes." These holes vary in value according to their size and the consequent amount of light they admit through them.
Logically, the smaller the "hole," the less quantity of light admitted; therefore the smaller the hole, the darker or greyer it is in value
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I can't speak to the optics involved, only that this is a matter of observation. In the case of your painting, the light you see in the photo has more to do with the value clumping problem of film than it would if you were painting the scene from life. The sky holes in your hedge need to be darker than you show them, but still light enough to read as sky through the hedge. They need color, so you would want to consider a greyed-down blue, of a temperature you need to decide.
I have used this same principle in painting hair, where bits of background show through. The "holes" in the hair get a darker, greyed-down version of the surrounding background color.
Although Carlson's book is on landscape, every portrait painter should read it too, since it is overall, a book about observation.