When taking a course of any kind for reasons of self improvement, there are no grades or objective benchmarks that have real meaning. I find that, even when I'm struggling through something, it's whether I learned anything along the way that matters most. The course I'm taking is written material with illustrations, video demonstrations of exercises that students paint along with and short critiques from the teacher. She also answers any questions we have along the way. We also see all the student work and their critiques.
The crits are nothing like what you'd get at an art school. It's mostly positive reinforcement. Although there was a pencil exercise that I redid because I hadn't taken it seriously enough. It's not that I couldn't have done a painting over it but it was so loose that it would've been the same as painting without a sketch at all. The teacher points out the parts of the paints that successfully hit the points of the specific lesson. But her answers to student questions are often the most informative part of her comments.
But when I look at the painting above, what I'm happiest with is what you're not seeing. It's the changes I made at the stage where the painting was going all wrong. For example, the wall to the upper left and the ground were much too dark. I had to mix a new color that would fit the rest of the painting but at a higher value. Also, the sweater looked great at one point but was much too warm and violet. So I struggled to duplicate the look but with different colors, remixing several times.
The result of all those corrections is a painting with a variety of colors withing the big color shapes. It gives extra interest without necessarily adding detail. I like it a lot. But this raises a question in my mind as I look forward to doing my own paintings.
Can I do it on purpose?
--Tad
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