Bump because we're back in action, read the updated first post for extra details. First thing on the order of buisness is a master study, I think I'll be doing one of John Constable's paintings (taken from the MOMA free ebook Constable's England). After that I'll do a piece from imagination, based on said study, and with a short writeup of what was learned.
See you back here in a couple of hours!
Edit:
Ok, here's the study. The original is the top one:
Things that were noticed/learned/a pain in the ass:
-Colour is rather relative, most easily used with varying saturation. The original for example is pretty much all slightly different hues of yellowish green. Even the sky, but it's so desaturated that it looks cool compared to the ground so it appears correct and even blue at first. This is something I've learned before but it's always nice to see and try it out in practice. So desaturating a warm colour cools it off, and you can limit your pallette in this way without having the image look unrealistic. What you do need to get right in that case is the values, because those play a big role in making things appear as they should (so the sky can't be a darker value than the ground because it wouldn't look like the sky anymore, regardless of how accurate the colour is).
-Grass is still a bitch to paint properly, this might be because I only used a single brush for the whole thing but I think it's more with getting it looking grassy enough, as in, a bunch of grass toned noise, leaving the brain to chalk it up as grass and not something else.
-Painting zoomed out and with the lasso tool is a must for getting some of the transitions quickly, mostly the sharp changes between cost and sea and land and sky.
Piece based on the study coming soon.