1). Water and reflections
2). Expressing fine, realistic detail
3). Knowing when to stop
4). Abstracting shapes in the distance
5). Confidence with glazes
Overall, I'm happy with this painting but I see a lot of room for improvement. With each piece that I do, I learn something. I ended up going back to this painting several times and tweaking it. At first, I had to add some very dark green to the water. This created a nice contrast with the bridge and the building. After that, something was still wrong with it and I thought a lot about what I could do to improve it. I ended up working in some black in the tree on the far right in order to frame the bridge and buildings and to create additional contrast.
I feel like I may be overworking my paintings. I'd love to take a class and get some feedback. Here's an animated gif of the above painting. Notice that it looks better prior to adding lots of detail. There seems to be a delicate balance between the need to add some darks to create value across the painting and allowing the paints to tell the story. :


I love the GIF! The changing camera angles made it a little hard but I love seeing in the making GIFs. Sounds like you're learning a lot, keep tracking what you learn and you will only continue to produce more awesome work. I love the water reflection! Good work!
ReplyDeleteThanks! I haven't got water and reflections down yet. That's one of my big goals. Are you able to paint reflections well? I've done a few excercises. Next week I plan to doña landscape with some water and will try again with my artist quality paints.
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