I decided to try this as a landscape, primarily because I really really didn’t want to paint tonight. I thought switching it up would entice me. I also spent some time making swatches of my pigments to learn more about how they blend. That was insanely helpful, I learned to stay away from Yellow Ochre as…

I started wondering why my colors were so quick to get muddy, and I realized my yellow and red are both cadmium, which are much more opaque than my Phthalo Blue. So I grabbed some Payne’s Grey to give me more neutral darks, and Hansa Yellow, which is more transparent. I thjink these lend themselves…

Who cares about proportion?” Said the scarecrow as he tried to duck into his tiny house nestled under the rare Sequoia Maple.

This was an experiment in value structure… trying to worry less about color and more about value. My photo has the sky more saturated at the horizon because it was overcast. This painting doesn’t communicate overcast though, which is why the sky probably feels inverted.

Part of my “statement” I guess with this exercise (and why I am posting them on Facebook, especially the bad ones) is to illustrate how much time and effort goes into a craft. I think a lot of people see someone do something well and it looks so effortless they think either “She is so…

This time I tried to loosen up a bit, and further reduced the elements in the painting. I added the clothes line because I like the “story” it tells of an Amish girl with a bright red dress. I added a horse and buggy, but the proportions are all wrong. The sky is way to saturated,…

I further loosened up, and added some chicken blobs to compensate for killing off the horse and buggy. They feel childish, I need to simplify. I used more Ivory Black to try to neutralize the sky, and it didn’t really work. I like the Phthalo blue in the sky, and the mountains feel better than…

Here I tried to cool down the house, though I was afraid it would recede too far. It ended up looking ok to me. I also added some hills, and cows and hay bales, and another fence… sheesh! The composition is an improvement again, but I overworked the sky, and the grass, and the fence posts…

This time I reduced the elements in the painting, and added a fence to try to help with perspective. I still relied too heavily on the masking fluid, and the house looks like it’s been cut and pasted into the painting. The scale is off for the field, and those mountains (where’d those come from?)…

This time I used Arches paper, and I wanted to stretch it. I messed up on the stretching, and redid it three times. That ended up washing all the sizing off the paper, and the colors didn’t blend at all. The trees look too geometric, and the whole thing feels very muddy because I overworked…

This is my first attempt. I used crappy paper, and it was a nightmare. First lesson was to bite the bullet, and use Arches. Second, I relied too heavily on the Masking fluid to preserve my whites. The chunky whites feel like a gimmick. I also relied fairly heavily on Ivory Black (I use Daniel…

I have always enjoyed painting, but have never dedicated myself to really learning how to paint well. I remember trying to learn how to paint with water colors as a kid because I loved what I saw artists do with the medium. But, I was never able to achieve that level of success with the…