Hey there, here's tonight's update!

This post was quite a few hours in the making, I think you'll be able to see why upon looking below. Here's today's reference image.

Claude Monet - "Landscape near Montecarlo"

I chose this one to be the last painting for this week because of its stunning color. I know I'd need all I've learned from the other paintings this week to finish this piece. If the Renoir yesterday took the cake as far as color goes, I feel like this one bought the bakery. There's an amazing amount of movement in the image, brush strokes vary in angle to aid that illusion, and do so perfectly. There are vibrant reds in the background, beautiful touches of indigo in the foreground, and a lovely soft sky in the back. So, this was a daunting task, how do you think I did?

I think this one's my new favorite. I'm gonna admit to going a bit overboard here with most of these paintings this week. They were just supposed to be simple color studies. The idea was that I have one image to work from, so that I can train my eye to spot the color without using the color picker, but I went and did full on reproductions. I guess I got carried away? Oh well, I'm super happy that happened because this has been enormously fun, challenging, and rewarding. I know everything isn't quite where it should be, and the edge of the land in the background is much darker than in the reference image, but I can't help but love this piece.

Instead of painting this piece on one layer in Photoshop, I did it on a few separate ones to show how the process of painting something like this goes (it was implemented first because I was kinda terrified I'd mess it all up and have to paint over everything, but good save, right?). I made a little gif here for you to check out so you could see how this progressed, check it out. Oh, and be warned, it's kind of a big file, so it might take a second to load.

Neat, right? That's all for tonight. Expect more color and composition studies for the rest of the month. I'm gonna try to look up some new painters tomorrow and see if I can find some different and exciting art! Don't forget to check back again for something new!