You can tell I'm a teacher from the title of this post, can't you. OK, let's get a few things straight. I make my pictures - paintings, sketches, whatever - because I love doing it. I get satisfaction from it, and I don't pretend to be a great, or particularly good artist - I'm not. If people are good enough to give me money for any of my pictures, well, I'm not going to turn it down. But if I never sold another picture - a distinct possibility - then I wouldn't stop doing it. So to that extent, it wouldn't necessarily matter if I never became any better at it.
However, while painting is not a competition to me, I'm honest enough to admit that I'd still like to get better at it. If we compare it with sketching, particularly sketching with an ink pen, although you can always improve, and it would be lovely to get better, I'm not unhappy with my sketching. Most of the time I get results that I'm pretty happy with. But then I was always drawing as a kid, and I never really stopped as I got older When it comes to painting though, effectively you can say that I've only been doing it since the summer of 2015 - three years. So I have to admit that question does occur to me - am I actually getting any better.
To this end I've been looking at a scan of my very first acrylic painting (I sold the original) and comparing it with my latest canvas. It helps that they both have similar subject matter. Here's my first:-
Now here's my latest:-
Now, I don't want to criticise my first painting for the sake of criticising it. This was where I had to paint like this to help learn to paint the way I can paint now. I think that if you look at the front end of both engines you can see the development. I don't think I could have painted figures like those in the second picture back at that time either. Verdict? Still room for improvement, but making some progress.
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