May 20th, 2012

I've heard it said that artists are never completely happy with the final result of their efforts, and I think it must be true in my case at least. I find when I've "finished" a painting there's always something that I think could have been done a little better. But I also know that you can "fix" something worse than it was before, so you have to stop somewhere.

My latest effort is another acrylic, Tararua Sunrise No. 4 (see below). On the whole I'm pretty pleased with the way it's turned out, but in order to be completely happy with it I would have:

Slightly darkened the colour of the middle ground hills
Slightly lightened the highlights of the middle ground hills
Got the shading a bit more even in the shadow areas
Hidden the pencil outlines, which can still be seen slightly from an acute angle

I guess this is one of the reasons why we never stop painting - we always know there is something more to learn, and the next one will be that much better for it.

I'm still having trouble getting good photos of my acrylics. For this one I tried fiddling with the white balance, ending up with the setting for natural light under cloud. Then I tweaked the brightness and contrast in Gimp, slightly reducing contrast and increasing brightness. The result is reasonably close to the original, but not perfect.