Snowy Mountain Town

Been trying to get back into my three hour speed paintings. And failing. I need to set more rigid timelines. The trouble with being on break is you want to keep coming back and tweaking, and that defeats the whole point of everything. So I'd say with futzing and messing around this is more like 4-5 hours over two days.

I've been working more in black and white to start lately, just to really focus on values. I'm not sure if it's actually good or bad. On the one hand my values are improving. On the other hand I think my colors feel less spontaneous. I've been painting back into the finalized work and this seems to help somewhat.

This is the spot that I don't like, where everything feels soft. It's in between being gestural in a cool way and being detailed in a cool way, but instead to me it just feels like halvsies with all the negative bits of both. I've been told I'm too harsh on myself, but I really think it's true!

And this is where I am at. I think it's less soft, but it still feels a little halvsie-ish. (I'm inventing words!) It definitely feels better, but the definition on the town feels somewhat out of place with the background. I'm still trying to decide how to rectify this in the future, but I'm going to try to keep my hands off this for now.