Beautiful depection of an Italian/Spanish town!

Could be Sienna?

You have probably bought your supplies a long time ago, but I'll answer anyway because I find myself on the same search as you. One of my issues is that I tend to work in different techniques and have not found a specific 'lane' yet. I'm slowly starting to try and make some consistent choices to build small series of similar work, but honestly so far it's a bit of a mess of different media, surfaces and sizes. This is my current set of choices: - oils: practice work on oil primed paper, usually A4, currently usually the Talens Cobra brand paper; outdoor work on small size canvas boards, usually 24x30cm; sometimes 30x40cm. Lately I've found myself trying out bigger canvasses: 60x80cm linnen canvas. - acrylics: practice work mainly on paper, currently usually Strathmore acrylics, they are slightly larger than A4, I think. Also nice: wooden boards, which I gesso myself, 30x40cm, very nice for acrylics because of the smoothness. - gouache: usually sketchbook size - soft pastels: pastelmat, lately I've gone a little bigger to give myself some more space, 30x40cm.

@Jo Edwards I'm not sure, to be honest I don't think it matters much. I notice that a lot of the important issues (composition, value structure, color harmony, edges) are true for any medium. What is specific to each medium is getting to know its particular behaviour and quirks. For instance, in pastels you obviously don't deal with brush handling and colour mixing (at least not in the same way), but everything else is still true. In acrylics, blending and gradation work differently than in oils and gouache is different again, but then we are talking about very specific features that are not the major things that decide if your painting is going to be a success or not. The good thing is that you take the lessons of one medium to another. E.g. I notice that I am much looser and more confident with color when doing pastels than when I am doing oils. That teaches me that I should be more daring when using oils and push the colour variety more. I guess I haven't tried water colors yet because the whole process is in reverse (light to dark, rather than dark to light). All other techniques (oils, gouache, pastels) are the same in that aspect, including dealing with matters like using an underpainting or not. I notice that size does matter: if you do a bold study with acrylics in a sketchbook with a large brush, that brush has to be a lot larger on a 60x80cm panel because you won't see the same energy as in the sketchbook study (I currently have a work going that confronted me with that fact).

You managed to make acrylics look like oils! excellent colour harmony by the way.

Wow Ken, what a magical experience! I've seen Death Valley in its usual dry state (which was already quite impressive) but this kind of flower explosion would have completely uninmaginable for me. Nature can behave so totally unexpectedly. I can imagine it won't be easy to capture this in paint. Your value study looks promising. Keep edges soft!

I do think it has a lot of potential, but I do find that the many curves in the road and the quite broad midsection create some unnecesarry distraction. I think with a few less curves and a few straighter sections, as well as more connected sides (that is, a little less broad grassy section in between) things would fall into place, since everything else works great.

@Renate Wagner I see what you mean, it ís quite a meandering path. Well it could also be a matter of taste, so please don’t change anything that you think is working!