It's been awhile sense my last design, and I'm a little rusty, but I'm working on getting back into flow with everything, but yeah I know Christmas is right around the corner, but this is a gift to the Aviary Community as well as the developers for all their hard work, and great web apps.

So this is what I made yesterday in about 8-10 minutes.

Now today I wanted to expand it, and make it better before I show the Aviary community, and I'm planning on making a small scene with clouds, sun, tree, etc: etc: So I drew the small template, but I'm still fairly new to painting, and don't know how to make a decent tree from here.

If anyone has any tips on how I can make this better, and tutorials or anything to improve painting I'd love to hear it, thanks!

Try grabbing some bark images and paste them into the tree shape with a bark cutout. =)
First you need to create a tree shape - render out the bark image - alpha to select your tree shape - select your bark layer - edit/copy ---- select tree shape layer edit/paste into - anchor layer
make sure the new bark layer is above the tree shape layer.
this effectively creates a quick cutout of the exact tree shape.
make the original bark layer invisible so you only have the tree shape bark - use overlay or whatever layer mode that works best for you. - use masks for touch up's..whatever.
create shadows highlights what not for effects.

I used this effect for this image...

Those are great eggs! I have tried using Raven on Aviary to learn how to do vector images....ginormous FAIL

Here is one i whipped out real quick, but i am sure you can find better looking bark. =)

My goal for this painting as well as many others I wanna get to do is not to use ANY stocks, just paint it using only gimp with the mouse, and sometimes use filters, depending on the project. I know I can do it though, it just takes practice.

I see what you're getting at though, I'll give it a try, but painting it, no stocks I may look at a reference image though for some help.

As for Raven it's very easy to use, like InkScape imo. I'm not big into vector editing, but I got the basics, and that down, but don't ask me to create characters, as that'll be a huge fail, but logos, and icons I can do.