Windmill 3 hour Painting

I was talking to a friend yesterday about digital painting and she found a flickr stream with some fantastic pictures. I decided to use one for my painting today:

"Windmill near Alkmaar" by miquitos

In the process of painting I screwed around with my base layers a lot today, so I can't really show the progression.

More daytime, springier colors. Fewer sheep.

Every time I chose to add the sheep in it just looked dumb. Maybe dumb isn't the right word, it was just too cute. Maybe it's too many FPS games, but a drawing that is too cute starts to get on my nerves. (Maybe this is evident on the fact that I even apply flowers like spatter? Perhaps I have a problem.)

I'm sort of happy with how it came out, but there are still issues. My trees feel too airbrushed and there look like there are some places that could be improved with the windmill blades too, they seem too outliney.

I also have fundamental trouble simply laying down a structure. What I mean is, a structure should be simple to draw, it's geometric so in theory you only need a couple of square strokes to gesture it, but I always go in and noodle around with it and make it look weird. This especially happened with the windmill. Maybe an example would help make my point:

Here is Shaddy Safadi's "Old Zoo" site painting:

 The structure is really nicely defined, but if you look closely you see that there is really very little to it. When I try to draw any sort of structure I go through tens of layers. That just seems silly, maybe I should sit down and crank out like 100 sheds. It's not a bad idea, really. I'd love to find a video of someone doing this.