I’ve been browsing through the work I did in 2024, and it occurs to me that, for those times I was doing “master copies” of other artists’ work, I had two methods. One was just a straight copy when all I had to look at was the artist’s painting or drawing. The other was copying via the mini challenges at Acrylic University.

What I’ve realized now, in review, is that for the painting lessons, I would refer to the reference photo and the painting, watch the video, then do my own thing (more or less) so that my work is full of flaws. I would focus on the loose and expressive style, but I didn’t have the fundamentals down!

An example is below — from the week 15 painting for Jed Dorsey’s Mini Painting Challenge at Acrylic University. 

The first thing I see is I do a poor job of conveying form and perspective. Everything is flat and abstract in part because my colors are much too saturated and also because the proportions are all wrong, particularly of the houses.

My painting does not properly reflect perspective; Jed’s alley gets visually narrower in the distance, while mine does not. In addition, his brushstrokes for the alley are vertical relative to the picture plane, which helps move the eye to the end of the alley in the distance. My alley brushtrokes are horizontal which does nothing to convey perspective.

My buildings are out of proportion relative to each other and relative to their roofs, and they do not appear 3-dimensional. In addition, the trash bins near the yellow house appear to float.

Ironically, in my initial sketch on canvas (below), I seemed to have a slightly better sense of proportion, but I didn’t think about using my brushstrokes to convey form and distance. If I were to do this painting again, I might consider tracing the large shapes of Jed’s painting first, just to get the placement right within the 6×6 panel.