Before and After

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I painted this scene from Yellowstone a few months ago, and it's been bugging me ever since. It seemed unfinished, but I was a little afraid to go back over it, for fear I might overwork it and ruin it altogether. But since I was unhappy with it anyway, I decided to go at it this weekend and see if I could make any improvements.

On my first attempt, I basically just copied exactly the values from my reference photograph. But on my second attempt, I really tried to visualize the true values of the landscape (photographs clip both ends of the light/dark spectrum, giving false values). There was too much dark in the sky and distant hills, making them jump up into the foreground, and there were too many hard edges I the sky.


Although I'm not 100 percent satisfied with this painting (I'm not sure that will ever happen anyway), I'm happy that it seems my changes improved the feel of the image, instead of the opposite, which seems to be what usually happens :)


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