Painting from photographs

  What you are looking at are two paintings done from photographs. The "mill pond" was done with Bernie at one of our tuesday night paint outs. He has a program he uses from time to time that shows the picture in stages. First stage was all the darkest parts. The next stage just added in a lighter dark and so on and so forth. Lastly was color.  This is to train your eye to see shapes instead of looking at the picture as a whole. It was extremely difficult for me because I did not know what we were doing.  I moaned and complained the whole time until the end.  I then got the idea and I know if I get to use the program again it will be much better.

  The "red barn" is just a photo I took and wanted to paint.  I enjoyed trying to shade the colors and add shadows.  I tried to get a sense of depth, which I feel I got close to, but I could not figure out how to mix the paint to get the color I wanted for the background trees.  I have a bunch of things I want to learn about oil painting and I am starting to remember things I have been shown by other artists while I am painting. I gave myself two weeks to figure this painting stuff out but I think it might take a bit longer. Ha!

Thanks for looking.