Sunday painter

I have been doing a lot of reading about oil painting and looking at many oil painting photo demonstrations and somewhere in my reading there was a suggestion to do your own demonstration to make yourself aware of where your problems begin. Since many of my paintings start our fine and end up a mess I decided that this was a good idea. Here's my demo. Using a photo and a canvas that had a middle value ground I start out by painting in the negative shapes. (The area around the palms and shadows).

I lay in the dark values in the palms and the grass.

I decide to take out the palm fronds on the left hand side, so I scraped them out, add some more paint to the sky and lay in the shadow and the lower palm fronds and the palm trunks.

I darken the shadows and added some paint to the ocean.

I start to add color and value changes to the palm fronds and I scrape away the right hand palm because I realize I need to adjust the color (make it blue-er) to establish distance. I start to lay in the ground shrubs at the base of the palms.

I decide the palms don't look right so I scrape parts of them away and add more sky.

And here I make the exact mistake again, to many fronds and the distant palm on the right is too heavy and too green.

Here I get more air back into the upper palms, get the distant palm to be okay, but not great and then I screw up the shadow.

By this time I am sick of blue and green, so I throw in some red, and some color variation to the sand, which doesn't show up here and start to rework the shadow and give the ocean a little wave action.

I have added a lot more paint to the sky and reworked the shadow shape. And that's as far as I got. I'll look at it tomorrow and see what to do next. And I think working it like a demo helped. By the way the photo was from wetcanvas.com, they have copy right free photos on their site.