As i have mentioned before, this painting is going along very slowly, for two reasons: (1) it’s a project that i’m not allowed to bring home; (2) the techniques i am learning are taking a long time to get right.  However, there is movement.  I finally finished, today in class, the upper field, and started working on the trees that will be in the foreground.  When you look at the piece this will probably not be obvious — teacher wanted me to start with the leaf canopy (ies), and NOT the trunks of the trees.  So, if you look on the upper left side of the painting, you can see some shapes that will, next week, turn into trees.  The colors of the “leaves”  here are not “true” ; they look ok “live”

This is the painting i am working on at home, without any teacher input.  Consequently, there are quite a few things i am figuring out as i go.  So this week i did some more work on the sky, began working on reflections in the water, and today started to figure out how to do the silhouetted trees and surround.  As you can see from the reference photo, it’s quite a challenge to put this part together, as all the detail is washed out.  So i am kind of making up part of it.  This is just the first go-round, so i will keep working to get it to “work”.  The part of the sky which in the reference photo appears as white, as do some of the reflections, is really all “blown out”  so i had to make up something that would come across as a bit more realistic.

I’ve just begun a new painting, at home.  So this one might need some expert input, but at least for now i am on my own.  i don’t want to take up valuable class time with a new one, when i’ve Got so much still to do on the  “in-class” project.

So, this reference photo is from a calendar,; Norma cropped some of the photo to improve the composition.  as i said above, this is in the pre-preliminary phases.  I plan to block in the water and the sky before adding the silhouetted trees.  Should be an interesting challenge.

Still a long way to go with this painting-from-a-painting, but i am continuing to learn more with each session.  It’s been so long since i started this one i will go ahead and repost the “original”, and then my progress to date (or maybe the other way around,

depending on what this program decides to do).  So last week and today in class (which, you may recall, where i’m Restricted to working on this project), i worked on the bank in front of the trees and the partial snow-and-weed field behind the bank.  More instruction on new brushstroke, so slow going continues.  However, i think teacher may let me speed up some, as he wants me to have this done by May 19th, which is some deadline for submission to a local art show.  We’ll see.