A little bit of both, but I’m watching someone else paint and do this stuff and trying to follow along. It’s not really instructional, for example most of the videos on YT of painting are just someone doing their thing with timelapses and set to soft music, no voice over to explain what they are doing or why/how. Frustrating. For example, for weeks I thought this guy was making clouds with a sponge and I struggled to get his results, and just a few days ago realized he’s using a piece of seat cushion, which explains a few things. Now I need to get my hands on some seat cushion!
And in every case, I’ve had the most success one I shut the video down and start going my own direction. But I’m learning a lot by just experimenting and finding out what works for me. I’ve gotten a little bit of different inspiration and ideas on technique from watching many different channels on YouTube - for example, one woman (with only 2 videos, a shame) had a great way to make clouds with actual kitchen sponges (which is what I have) and so I tried her technique to do this latest one.
Painting #4 is, however, my own original idea - I just wanted something with trees, water, and clouds to practice those things on, so I made that one up as I went along.
And I also need to recognize the guy that I’m mainly watching/enjoying has been doing this for… I don’t even know. His channel has been around more than a year, and presumably he’s been doing this for years before he started putting this stuff up (his very first video is amazing), and I’ve been at it for only a few weeks. So I’m trying not get to too frustrated when I don’t get results like this:
This one was an absolute bear. I spent hours on it last night, woke up at 4:30 am to work on it some more (couldn’t sleep), woke up again to work on it after falling back asleep, ended up re-doing the lower left corner four times, the clouds I was going for just did NOT work so I decided to completely pivot and try to free-hand a water sunset and I am a happier with that than what I was going for, though it’s just a completely made up scene. I could probably improve on this one here and there, but I’m ready to try something new, this one nearly broke me.
This week’s painting was a bit of a challenge since I was trying something a lot more advanced than my skill level, and on a much larger canvas than I normally like to work with, so I had to get some extra details that… worked sometimes, less so other times. I suppose I could take a break from it (I started on it yesterday) and see what it looks like in the light of the morning but I’ve redone huge chunks of this as it is, so I think it might be better to work on a new one and try something like this again when my skills have improved.
So darn jealous of you artists…I dropped a BEGINNING drawing class in college because the teacher made fun of one of the students for his “best” human figure drawing…actually made fun of them in class. I saw the drawing and mine was far worse…so i just walked out right then. Good job on those!
I would have dropped that class in the exact same manner, myself. Honestly, I went to school for engineering because I knew I would never “make a go” of being a professional artist or anything, and the idea of taking a class as a young man would have been totally lost on me - but it’s something I’ve thought about getting back into as an adult on and off, so here I (finally) am. Better late than never, I guess! Though, now I kind of wish I had a local night school art/painting class I could take after all - YouTube is a great resource but it’s been tough to sort of blindly make my way through what works and what doesn’t, lots of trial and error that might be much easier if someone could just show me something in person, for example.
I like what you’ve done with shadows under the trees there Scott and the way the bright grass on the other side sits in front of the trunk. Nice dramatic sky too!
I forgot to say too that the top left, golden sky painting with the sun rays, looks great. Love those colours.
It’s been kind of a bummer last few weeks, and I haven’t felt much like painting lately, but I decided to try something new this morning and it turned out decently, I think. Not what I was hoping for, but better than I had feared, overall.
Your trees really are getting there. Bit of a pointilist / expressionist vibe there. You might want to create depth by choosing slightly darker browns and reds for the far trees and keep the lighter ones for the closer ones.
The illusion of grass in the foreground is spot on! I also like how dynamic you made the water.
Oh, thanks for the advice and the complements! I actually took your advice to heart and since I had my paint out to start another project anyway, I tried to darken in the back of the river area and brighten some of the foreground trees. Hopefully this is what you are talking about, though I think the change is a positive one.
