IN the past day i received a suggestion to give up on the notion of having the grasses on the left mid-painting be in different horizontal positions (as that was clearly not working) and just have them stand up vertically. I tried this and things seemed to improve. Then the only other thing i did was to apply several different values of green to try to simulate some perspective for those grasses. Finally, on another topic, i lightened up the sky, adding more color to match some of the reflections in the water.

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Since my last posting I’ve been working mainly on the left side of this painting, trying to improve the look of the grasses. I got rid of the “tops” and repainted quite a number of the stems. Then i tried to figure out what to do with the areas further back. For starters i wiped out the whole area, covering it with a brown base. At that point i could see that it was going to be very difficult to fill in that whole area — too big. So next i moved the mountains, adding a couple of sections. that seemed to work pretty well, so then i was just left with the dilemma of how to fill in the background grasses. That dilemma will hopefully be solved in the next day or two with some additional and contrasting layers.Might work; might not.

Started a new painting a couple of weeks ago. It’s about half done, most likely. It is quite different from the original reference photo, which is beautiful but kind of darker than i wanted the painting to be. Photo was taken at sunset in winter. So the feeling of the painting, once it gets completed, is going to be maybe a bit less peaceful than the photo.