please share your thoughts on this painting?

Hi!

Not bad at all for only your 3rd.

You're too dominant on the right side. Your clouds, your tree foliage, and your overall composition has everything heavier on the RH side. BALANCE is something you really need to keep in mind when you paint.

You need some work on General Composition.

The most important Element of Composition you are missing is Point. There is no point to this painting. It is two waterfalls combining into one, with some lopsided trees and a whole bunch of fluffy clouds...What is the point? What should the viewer get out of looking at this?

Once you've answered that question in your mind, the next one is, Where is the Main Focal Point of this painting? What is the eye supposed to be pulled to when you first look at this?

Once you have your main focal point, then you need to put every other object on your canvas to support, enhance, and redirect the eye back to that focal point. The eye will move around, that's how we see. The trick is to get it to move around your picture the way YOU as the artist want it to. And then to direct the eye back to that main focal point to journey around the picture again. Hopefully noticing little things you missed the first time...

My eye is drawn to the meeting point between the two waterfalls. The eye is then drawn into the waterfalls, and drops like a rock to the bottom of the canvas, where it slows up for a moment with the white mist trying to stop me, but I plunge through, and off the bottom of the canvas, never to be seen again...

Oh wait! The green pointy tree on the right (which is the ONLY pointy tree, why is that?) gives my eye an arduous and rocky journey back up the side of the canvas, but OH! My eye is dragged back to the waterfall...Oops! Damn!

When my eye CAN struggle up the right side, it is met by trees pushing me back to the right...Even the clouds in the sky don't want me to look to the left...

As far as technique, water is not your strong suit. you've painted a bunch of too bright blue with a whole lot of white vertical lines...Water is not blue. Water is clear. When you see water that is blue, it is reflecting the blue sky. This means that anytime you paint water blue, you HAVE to make sure the sky is the same color. It can be much paler, but the hue needs to be the same, and darker. The white you see in water is mist. This too, is translucent, so that it should seldom to never be opaque or solid looking.

The rocks are truly pretty awesome. They are my favorite part of this piece. The trees show potential, but they are too dense, and one-sided.

If you continue painting landscapes, you need to either stop painting water, or dedicate yourself to painting nothing but water for the next 5-10 paintings, so that you can master the ability to render water that looks like water. It's a difficult skill, which is why many artists choose to avoid a lot of water... ;)

I'd give this a strong 6 for your 3rd painting ever. Nice effort.

~M

The painting is pretty nice for a third. The photograph however is most excellent. Yeah I know you told me to focus on the painting but the photo is just amazing. Composition, light and contrast are perfectly balanced in such a way I can not believe this is an accident.

Hints for the painting. Use more colors next to each other specially in contrast. The foam may be white but having grays and blues will make it come to life more. The water will look more lively when it's also green and has the rocks gray behind it shine through.

The photography: I think you found your calling.

It's really good. But I would suggest making the trees along the horizon look different from the trees growing out of the rock on the right hand side halfway down. Like make the one on the right halfway down darker than the others, or vice versa.

It's too blueish, it needs shadows and warmer tones