Gives me impressionist vibes.

And I have trouble properly photographing my artwork, too.

Use real cameras and special lighting set ups and so on.

Good job!

... tone down the background mountains. It helps to convey depth and distance. Distant images are always muted when light is refracted by moisture in the air.

Range especially, lighter and with more bluish-gray. I will try to fix that.

You've done that beautifully in some areas. For example, the low clouds--which are more distant than high clouds--have very soft edges. But the top of the mountain in the mid distance is as crisply defined as anything in the foreground.

Please know I wouldn't offer a suggestion if I didn't have such respect for your artistic talent and skill.

It’s like, I’ve watched hundreds of hours of videos and I should know this stuff but I always forget this or that! Thank you! 💙💙💙

... and acrylics, is that you can fix things. Japan dryer, and other additives for oils shorten the time you have to wait before you an overpaint. With heavy impasto, you can grow a beard before you can tweak it!
I've worked in all mediums, but I much prefer watercolor. It's less forgiving, but I like the spontaneity it affords you.
The weather's miserable here today, so maybe I'll putz around some more figuring out how to post images, and show some of my work. I'm 2 years and change shy of 80, so I'm a bit technologically challenged, but my lexicon of profanities is deep, so I'll overcome the frustration eventually. Wish me luck!
And keep working. You've got a distinctive style, and as you refine it with practice, you'll enjoy the satisfaction. It's valuable to study the work of artists you admire; they'll have a lot to teach you.

It’s true, but it is so challenging, and stretching the paper is kind of a hassle…although I like that watercolors are much easier on your brushes, they last forever….i have some nice squirrel quill brushes I will have until I die, hopefully…had them for decades already…

very nice and i always love oils because
the oil fairy comes overnight and the next morning
my paintings always looked better! could just have been
getting a better perspective but i like thinking oils are
magical

Photorealism is nice, but the ambiguity of objects painted like this is more appealing, at least to me.

I tried working in oils but I don't think I have the patience. It looks like you certainly do.

Oil painting is a million times easier, watercolor is devilishly hard to do and so unforgiving!

Oil painting doesn’t take too long to dry if you use some Liquin or a quick drying medium like that. I did this painting over two days, sessions of about two hours each I think? And the first layer had dried by the next day. If you have a little space for a dish rack or something to set your paintings in while they dry, it all kind of works out, you just keep juggling a few paintings at a time, I think.

I’ve watched so many videos now and read blogs and books and it feels like there are quite a few different approaches to oil painting. I think ala prima is quicker than the traditional Flemish method of painting a grisaille and then other thin translucent layers on top.

But the traditional method gives such beautiful luminous results, especially on portraits.

You did a great job!

So says this art major! Hey, I got tired of studying at the very demanding high school I attended. Worked sooooooo hard to make grades! Lost count of the all-nighters I spent studying. Then I got to college and discovered the radio station, and that was all she wrote.

Got a story for ya that I hope will make you laugh:

We had one instructor, Pat Alt, who was fresh from the very freewheeling Cal Arts. He was pretty much open to anything. One thing that was a must for him: whatever art you produced didn’t really rate unless it was HUGE. At least a totally impractical and unrealistic 6x8 feet. (Okay. Where’s my mom gonna hang THAT in her house, ‘eh? And why would she even want to except as a sympathy vote?). But it WAS time for the final project.

I spread my ridiculously large canvass (including the required stretcher bars) out on the patio in the backyard of the house where my boyfriend lived. I set about “creating” with odd & cool stuff I bought at the local hardware store where my boyfriend worked. I used his employee discount to buy containers of broken glass bits, silver glitter, Plaster of Paris, big squirts of acrylic paint in white, black, and I think brown, too, and whatever else struck my fancy.

I covered the canvass with all that shit, in big blops and little sprinklings, sometimes shaken out onto the surface in different spots. I lifted one or two corners so everything would kinda run and ooze downward from where it was applied, but in different directions of downward. Then I turned the hose on it.

I decided I couldn’t think of anything more to do, so I left it outside there to dry overnight.

The next day (presentation day in that art class) I went out to inspect the results. Everything was dry, alright, but as it was laid out flat on the ground under that big tree, hundreds of little brown feathery spores had floated down all over the canvass, got stuck in place, and dried there. And if that weren’t enough, some unfortunate little caterpillar somehow crawled up onto the canvass and it, too, got stuck and perished.

I was mortified AND terrified. I thought it was the fiasco of all time and THIS was the final project to turn in for grades and class was in a couple of hours, so I was thoroughly SCREWED. There wasn’t time to try to make a new one.

So my boyfriend helped me drive it over to campus and set it up in the big art studio/“classroom”. We had to drive slowly because each of us had to stretch our outer arm through our open car window, reaching up to the roof of the car to hold my monstrosity in place. When we got it to campus and upstairs into the studio/“classroom”, I maneuvered it over kinda to one side so maybe nobody’d see it, leaned it against the wall, and then I hid (or tried to so hopefully nobody would spot ME either).

Well, no such luck. Each of us in class had to present our work so the teacher and classmates could comment, and a final grade, hopefully a good one, could be earned. My turn came, more or less, although I didn’t immediately present myself. So the critiques began. Just a few. Most didn’t really understand it. One uppity guy blurted out that it looked like shit. Teacher remained silent, just looking at the - uh - painting. Finally after what seemed like way too long, he spoke.

No. He actually gasped. Drew a LOOOOOONNNNNG breath. “Whose work is this?” I weakly held up my hand. He gasped again. And then he started, with feeling: “THAT… is… BRILLIANT!!! THAT… is one of the most brilliant works I’ve EVER… SEEN!!! O. M. G. THAT… could hang in the Nicholas Wilder Gallery ANY DAY of the WEEK!!!”

Well, I’d never expected ANY reaction like that, especially from the guy who was gonna give me a grade on it. And I’d never heard of the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, either. I was shocked! Speechless! I didn’t even have the nerve to look around at my classmates to see their reaction. I didn’t know WHAT to do. But fortunately, class was soon over and at least I could skeedaddle right outta there and disappear!

I left my “artwork” there and tried to forget about it. I’m pretty sure somebody finally threw it away at the end of the term. I didn’t want it because who among the people I knew would even have wall space to hang the damn thing, much less actually want to, and I sure didn’t have a place to hang it either. It was truly something even my mother couldn’t love, much less understand.

But, by Jove, I got an A.

You got an “A” at least for going to all that trouble!

I don’t have the ability to appreciate modern art. I think it is a matter of not having the education or maybe I don’t have the brainpower to understand art that is abstracted beyond a certain degree. There are some abstract works I really like, but definitely not all of them. The ones that are just paint splatters, I don’t respond to them emotionally at all. They don’t make me feel like the paintings of the impressionists or other less modern types of art do.

💙💙💙💙💙

I doubt anyone, deep-down, ever completely understands modern art. I guess it’s just all about subjectivity.

Maybe it’s simply a kind of groping for… well… whatever the individual involved thinks the need still is. Maybe it’s just one of many interpretations of jerking off.

Hey, whatever! Don’t mind me. I’m just an art major.

And it could just be that “art” is just three-quarters of the way toward “fart”!

🥴😈🤡

Clearly you've got the hang of this. Painting is a wonderful activity.

Have to remind myself, it’s the process that matters, not the result. It can be therapy of sorts, done right,

When it comes to creativity, I've always had a problem with being too attached to the results, often overlooking how positive the process can be.

because of the darkness that is always present in all things Irish. I really like it .

Wonderful depth - looks like I could just step right into it

They only way you will improve is to finish things and start the next one with improved skills. Keep at it, you are getting there already.

the importance from dark to light. My art teacher was a stickler on that ..........he taught us what Michelangelo did to perfect the medium. He showed us how to measure a human body by using the head as a reference. If you look at ones shoulders for instance and use your thumb to use the head as a reference you can see that the head is the size as to one side of the shoulder to the neck it will always be two heads wide and then to use the head to proportional see how many heads tall a person is and then when you get to the feet you use half of the head.......Michelangelo figures it out...........we had to draw the human body with muscles only , skeleton only, two weeks of nothing but hands....... feet..............I love art .............as much as I love planes..............

I do still struggle with getting the values right. I use a value finder. One of those things with shades from black to white, ten shades.

I think it would help me if I printed out large photos, like 8x10, to paint from instead of trying to paint from my iPad. I see instructors using laminated photos all the time to check the accuracy of their color mixtures and it looks like a very helpful thing, but…printing out photos is an extra expense, and I am trying to be frugal these days.

That’s cool that they taught you the tricks of measuring, I always remember being taught that the eyes are one third of the way from the top of the head…took a couple of art courses….now I just watch YouTube videos, but I find them enormously helpful and wish I had had access to those even in my teens…technology is amazing.

I pay for YouTube premium, it’s worth it to me because I watch YouTube honestly more than I watch regular tv. I watch at least a couple hours of art instruction a day on YouTube, so you can see where I’d find it worth the twenty dollars a month to be able to watch ad free.

Maybe I should stop being so cheap and pay fifty dollars a month or so to have big photos printed out. My art would improve a great deal if I did…

💙💙💙💙💙

Lovely

... in the foreground is very good. The work you need to do is educate your hand by the three Ps - paint, paint, paint. Paint the same thing multiple times. I think the back ground needs a little more detail with a smaller brush, and using paint that isn't to neutral. Are you using Sap Green for your back ground mix?

I'd like to see a painting of yours with a long depth - I'd like to see how you approach the mid ground.

Very nice work!

That’s definitely a task for me, getting that atmospheric perspective right.

... but it's obvious: you got the talent, you got the "vision thing"!

The nice thing about oil is you can change it anytime you want to, if you feel like it.

I love it just as is!

Thank you for sharing.

Byt then there are fhe smelly cgemicals for cleaning up...

Ah well...

Enjoy!

Photographing oil paintings, especially if they're in progress, is difficult because they are a bit shiny and it's really hard to avoid that shine in a photo. The art class I've been taking for years has been held on Zoom since the pandemic, and we send email photos to the instructor for him to evaluate and show to the rest of the class - and I'm always struggling to get a good photo with true colors and no shine. I've had the best luck with photos by placing the painting in an area where there's no artificial light shining on it, and during an overcast day. Then I use Photoshop to fix the colors if they aren't quite right. Once your painting is dry you can get deeper colors if you use retouch varnish but it will still be shiny in photos. Keep it up, you're doing great.

Method sounds much better, thanks for sharing that tip!

The understanding of depth perception always impresses me.