Even more progress, on my own

I am making progress - unguided by anyone but my instincts. And the memory of what my teacher has said from time to time. Which in itself is progress, because I feel more confident in my ability to approach my painting without fear of messing it up (beyond repair). I can mess things up, don't get me worng, but I can correct stuff if I need to and that gives me confidence. So, this evening, after posting up the last of Bath, England on the other blog, I went downstairs to add some color of a more appropriate nature to the foreground and experiment, a bit, with the bushes on the right hand side above the stream.



None of this is final in appearance. The grass will be browner and look more like straw. The bushes will be greener and darker in the shadows. But I understand what I have to do and I know what colors I will use in my mixes. What is there now is closer to what will be than what was there before. Huh?

Progress at last - I made it to class

I made it to class this week and actually made some progress on my new painting. It's going to be a bit hard to see in this photo, because the lighting is so bad, but there is actually color in the sky (it's actually all cloud, with a bright spot or two) and the ugly foreground color will get better, I promise. The underpainting is done - now it's just a matter of adding all of the appropriate color and some detail in areas that require it.



I've marked out the place where the little house is going to be and begun work on the waterfall and the downstream stuff. It's coming together nicely. I learned, this evening, that paint from the tube probably isn't going to be the color you want to use in your painting. You probably want to mix your colors yourself. That's probably the hardest thing to do - consistently. Mixing colors is an art in itself and it's something I really need to learn. You need to be able to repeat your color mixes from session to session - and that ain't easy. But I'm learning.