There are 31 days in some months, so I figured I’d go for one more. I tried to keep an eye on all the lessons I have learned. It’s not a complete success, but I am happy with this painting. I added the birds at the very end – and then the Pterodactyls came back.…

I would write up about this one, but I’m a bit worked up tonight… I tried. There.

Tonight my primary goal was to not overwork anything. I almost achieved it – the roadside brush I think was overworked, as was the Amish Nazgul. The sky I did the same as before trying to avoid backwash. I went back when it was dry to add shadows but didn’t soften the edges enough, so…

Tonight I tried wet on wet for the sky. (Cobalt & Yellow Ochre.) i dabbed Payne’s grey for extra shadows in the clouds. The grasses started as a flat yellow ochre wash, then dabbed shadows and highlights, preserving space for the house. As the wash dried, it actually looked pretty cool – like a geyser…

Today I tried painting the whole thing with cobalt blue, Quinacridone Rose, Hansa Yellow, Quinacridone Gold, and Bloodstone. I used a bit of yellow ochre in the sky to make the clouds because the Bloodstone granulated so much, and the Quin Gold makes green with Cobalt Blue. Starting in the top right with straight cobalt,…

I decided to try today without a sketch, I think it helped. I find myself obeying the sketch sometimes even after the paint has done its own thing. In this case, the paint started to wander, and I allowed it. I over worked the sky unfortunately, as well as the brush on the side of…

This time I tried to paint the sky in a single pass, I started with cobalt blue in the top right, and gradually washed in heavily watered yellow ochre, and cerulean, by the time I got to the horizon I was just using water, but I wasn’t careful enough to pull pigment to the horizon…

My goal today was to put down pigment in loose strokes, and then leave it alone. I painted almost the whole thing with my 120 quill in an attempt to break out of the detail mud. I like the lost and found edge in the field, and the splash of red in thelower left corner.…

I tried to start by masking the foreground, and painting the sky. I also sprayed masking fluid on the horizon – just to experiment. The texture from the spray brings the horizon forward – which is the opposite of what I want. It needs to go backward. Given the success of the prior painting – which…

Today I tried very hard to stay mindful of values, and boy did it pay off. This is the first one I like. I washed the value 3 spaces first, since that’s where I tend to overwork things, and committed to not touching them again. The 4s came next and I tried to really load the…

I tried something g a little different tonight. I sketched out the painting, then took a photo of the sketch, and used the markup feature on my phone to plan out the values before I started. Blue numbers represented cool tones, red colors represented warm tones. A 4 was supposed to be highly saturated, and…

I really didn’t want to share this one, but it’s all part of this exercise, so… I tried using the new squirrel quill for as much as possible on this one. I really like the way it adds movement because the soft hairs sort of do their own thing under pressure. But, I have to…

I decided to loosen up my painting and I’m glad I did. In order to break out of the tightness that had been weighing me down a bit, I figured I would change the scene a bit, so I painted from my imagination instead of the picture. I like the way the trees frame on…

I keep trying to paint the sky anything but flat, and it keeps looking cartoonish and flat. I’m gonna go with a looser sky tomorrow. I also tried Hansa Yellow at the horizon, but it just turned the sky green. I should have seen that coming. I have a tube of Cobalt Blue in the…