Struggling with this painting
1d
Tom
Hello everyone,
I'd like to share a project I've been working on and would really appreciate your feedback — any thoughts, tips, or feelings you get from the work.
Let me give you a bit of background. I work at an organic store and farm. A few years ago, one of my colleagues followed her dream and became a baker. She started her own sourdough bread business, baking right next to our shop. Our boss even built a small bakery space with a large oven attached to the building. The breads were made fresh daily, using flour from our own homegrown wheat.
Unfortunately, after a few years she stopped baking, and the bakery space stayed empty for a while. Recently, though, we started using it for a new project: monthly cooking classes focused on plant-based and vegan recipes. The idea is to promote health and sustainability while using high-quality products from our shop. It’s both educational and inspiring for our customers.
As someone who's always been proud to be part of this idea, I wanted to express it through my art. So I started drawing the building, imagining how it could be used for prints, flyers — something useful, cool, and beautiful. In the artwork, I’m trying to capture a mix of nature, machinery, wooden pallets, and teaching. This is what I’ve created so far.
It turned out into challenge my actual painting skills. And I-found myself struggling. I would like to postpone my self critic for now
I’d really love to hear your thoughts first😑🙂 — anything that comes to your mind!
Thank you so much!
It looks nice. It would make a great poster. My main critique is that the little building seems dwarfed by the background. I think it's mostly because the building and other foreground objects could probably use darker values to stand out more (or conversely, darken the background).
•
1d
Thanks for sharing this painting with us, @Tom! Really cool backstory and I like the message. It sounds like an awesome experience!
Given what you intend to do with this image, I have a couple of recommendations. First of all, I love how you've painted this scene and your perspective looks great. Since this could potentially be used as marketing or advertising material, I think showcasing the building and the actions within and around it would be top of the hierarchy in terms of importance. The building felt a bit small to me and seemed to be competing with the really beautiful scenery in the background. Increasing the size of the building not only helps you to see the detail inside, but gives that part of the image more visual weight, positioning it higher in hierarchy over the background. Cropping the pallet guy's activities a bit will implicate the class going on inside as the focal point. While he's still an important element, the viewer knows this is really about the class.
You could also play with the saturation in the foreground. Increasing it would help bring life to the activities going on and also emphasize the atmospheric perspective. You can also do this by further decreasing the saturation in the background and increasing the blurring on some elements.
Hope that is useful to you. Have fun painting 😁
Oh, thank you so much for your thoughtful and detailed message—it's always such a joy to receive that kind of response. I truly appreciate the time and care you put into it. Your enthusiasm for art really shines through!
You're absolutely right in your observations. I've been studying perspective for a while now, focusing on structure and precision. But recently, I've stepped into a whole new challenge—painting. With thousands of brushes in my Krita library and more layers than I can count, I’ve realized that perspective alone isn’t enough. Painting is a different world entirely. Without taking the time to study and approach it step by step, it's easy to fall into just randomly throwing brushes onto the canvas—which, honestly, is exactly what I did at first, and I ended up wasting a lot of time.
