Another Fixer-Upper

Before

West of Roswell

Acrylic on Board

24 x 24 in/61 x 61 cm

Copyright Byrne Smith 2017

After
West of Alamogordo
Acrylic on Board
24 x 24 in/61 x 61 cm
Copyright Byrne Smith 2018

If you recall, I posted several blogs recently about how it's never too late to re-work one of your "completed" paintings.

I want to tell you about my latest fixer-upper. I also wanted for you to be able to view my "before" and "after" efforts and judge for yourself--and hopefully encourage you to consider doing the same.

I finished the original painting almost a year ago, in July, 2017. I felt fairly pleased about it, enough so that I varnished it and hung it in my home. Every day I would see this painting multiple times just passing by.

As time passed, I began to notice minor things that I thought, gee, I could do better than that. What began as a few minor issues became, overtime, glaring errors that bothered me every day and every time I passed by (at least in my mind).

So finally, last week, I took the painting down, and it became my latest fixer-upper. It was acrylic on board, and I checked if it were OK to paint acrylic over acrylic varnish. It is.

The main thing I did was to remove the figure and the pathway. For some reason, neither seemed to fit into the New Mexican motif. Monet could paint fantastic figures in fields, me, not so much.

With the figure gone, I felt I needed to re-paint the foreground to look more naturally arid, which it is. I brightened the earth tone and color with broad, horizontal strokes. I also darkened the foliage of the lone tree and randomly added darker, horizontal strokes to make the scene appear to be in bright sunlight, which it was.

To add interest I decided to change the locale so that there is now a view of the White Sands National Monument. I used zinc white for the distant white sands and re-titled the painting. Lastly, I beefed up the cumulus clouds by adding more white to the puffy tops.

I hope you like my "after."