Painting from studies progression

Over the last seven days since my last post about painting studies I've been carrying on with some more as I am still seeing an improvement in my paintings from doing these. However they've turned from almost 1 to 1 studies into just using the images as reference and creating something new based from them.
I'm glad this has happened because one of my original concerns about doing studies is that there's not a lot of creativity in the design as it's practically just copying what you see in front of you. This had me worried that I wouldn't be able to design characters and scenes once I progress from doing study paintings. Thankfully though it seems like my studies are slowly transitioning into their own paintings, so I don't feel as worried about this anymore and feel confident in what path I'm on.

Going in order from the begging to the end of the week this is the first piece I painted since last time. I knew I wanted another man made object in my painting as I felt I had to experiment further with painting them in this loose style. I decided on a gas station to practice this. I find I can be very loose with painting the environments and when I tried to do the same with this gas station it didn't really work as well. My previous piece with the radio tower was alot tighter to get the straight lines needed. But I also used a different style of painting to get that to work. This time I wanted to paint the gas station in the same style. The result ended up looking a bit cartoonist. I think this is a mixture of two things. One is that while I'm painting loose I loose straight lines giving a misshapen look. This is the main problem and I believe if I can fix this and create more harder edges it could work. The second is that the colours (although I like them) don't really help make it look less cartoony. I'm exploring colours lately and I'm enjoying pushing it as far as I can. However in this scenario it didn't help.
After reviewing this I'm setting myself a task of painting another piece focused of a man made building again and fixing these issues.

   
This is the first piece that I start adding more design elements in there. Originally the cowboy figure wasn't in there but the composition wasn't working that well and I wanted something to fill that space in. Again with this piece I was messing with colour trying to add as much as I could in without it being overly obvious about how many variants there are in there. With these studies I'm also trying to paint things I've never painted before and a canyon is defensively one of them.  One thing I'd change about this piece is the foreground arch way. It's not really playing that well with the rest of the image because of the horizontal lines that aren't helping to guide the eye in the right direction. I'd prefer to have them angled towards the direction of the arc in the distance.

I wanted to revisit a similar study that I've already done and re paint it in a different lighting and try push it a bit further. My aim was to paint this scene in a lower light as if the sun was going down and catching areas of rock in light. A bit like the reference image but less drastic. My main problem with this one wasn't getting the lighting (although there is a lot of room for improvement) it was getting the composition. I wanted to paint two pathways that the character could possibly take instead of one point perspective like my last piece. My solution in the end was to make one point of direction a lot more obvious than the other. I did that by creating a lot more points of interest and light/colour. Getting caught up in this design problem had a knock on affect in the rest of my work I feel as there's areas that suffer that I know I can do better such as the sky. I feel like it doesn't match the image too well for a piece that's meant to be at dusk. I could have painted a cooler looking orange or pink sky that had a more dramatic effect but it seems as though I've neglected it. A way I can improve this might be more simple than I think. I should probably paint in the things I know that will work first before starting to paint and fix the problems as what I have painted already might naturally hep fix the problems in the painting.

 
And most recently there's this. It's not really relevant to what I want to achieve and improve on as my main goal is to focus on environments but I was looking for something different to paint after painting environment studies for over a week. I thought it would be interesting to use the same loose style to paint a one to one study from a still from a film. As I don't paint characters that often I felt this would be the best way to test this method as I didn't feel confident in creating my own while focusing on a new painting style. It went alright I guess. could use with more light on the right side of the face to make it pop a bit more but as a one off painting to give myself a break from landscapes it was a refreshing change and I now feel more energised to get back into landscapes after painting something different.

So main goal for this week is to paint a landscape with a man made building and to get the lines and harness of the edges right to make it not feel like a cartoon.

oh also my oil paints arrived this morning so I'll give that a go and see what I learn.