Learning from botched attempts

 So, to continue experimenting with the acrylics, I've been working on an Icelandic landscape. Above you can see the initial lay-in, rather watercolorish, on a toned background. Should have stopped right there!

The image above shows the end of the second session, and already I was losing it: the background is nice, but the foreground is getting too detailed, too overworked, too harshly contrasty.

Yikes. It's like two separate paintings! So I stopped here. One option would be to back now and paint over the whole bottom half of the painting - acrylics, being forgiving, will allow that. But when I got out some cropping corners and took a closer look, I saw that what's really needed is a pair of scissors -- the painting is really at the top of the page:

This is close to actual size - about 11 inches wide, and although the screen doesn't show the color or resolve the surface detail as well as in real life, it's pretty close. This is much closer to the direction I want to go in, and this failed painting has shown me a lot -- so it was well worth the effort.

Have a good weekend, everyone! The sun is actually shining here, so I hope to spend some of it outdoors.