Thank you for the award! I'm so excited to try out some new brushes! Thank you for hosting. It was a fun challenge and I've continued painting thumbnails. They are so helpful and easy to do with limited time.

Hello! This is my submission for the January Proko challenge! Love letters to the lonesome blues of winter, January 22. medium - oils on 2x2 Mdf boards and the reference images used!

Hi all, my name is Julia Kamenskikh, and this is my official entry for #prokochallenge organized by @tiffaniemangart and @prokotv Five tiny paintings, all sized by 2 in x 2 in. Painted with gouache and 3/4 in brush. And I think those are the smallest paintings ever done before. And cannot express how much I’ve enjoyed it. You are forced to simplify and it feels like solving a puzzle to me. I will be definitely doing these again, thank you Tiffany for such a great idea and all organizers for organizing this! All photos are taken by me.

Hi all! Here are my submissions and references. Really enjoyed the challenge. Thank you :)

Hi all. First I thank Proko & Tiffanie for giving us this great challenge. I made 5 thumbnails based on my own photography of my county landscapes throughout all seasons. 2x2", acrylics. I had a great time painting those thumbs!

I found myself in an interesting position where I had to create square thumbnails out of portrait-formatted pictures. I enjoyed using the polygonal lasso tool, I like the angular energy it gives to these pieces. I also forbade myself from using the color picker on the references, since I want to get better at eyeballing vivid colors.

Here is my collection of five mini landscapes for the Tiffanie Mang-Proko challenge! These are all done in gouache from a combination of direct observation and memory. I used only a 3/4 inch flat brush and a medium-sized, pointed round, and sometimes a colored pencil. Here are some goals I had: I wanted to paint all of these from life, around my home. I wanted each to present a different challenge (how do you paint a scene in pitch black for example? Or in freezing cold? Bright light? Fleeting light? etc.) I tried to simplify the scenes, using cleaner sweeps of the brush, keeping a little focused detail only where necessary. I hoped for each painting to stand on its own, but also as part of a cohesive set. I found interesting ways to accomplish these goals. For example, using dry media to start in the cold weather (to avoid frozen paint), or working partly from memory in the case of the darker scenes. This was one of my favorite challenges so far. I hope you enjoyed it too! Please leave a comment if you like.

Hello, here are my 5 submissions! As a character artist, this challenge helped me conquer my fear of landscape painting haha. I was able to really push the way I see values, hue shifts, and big masses. Simplifying rocks into simple shapes was pretty challenging and seeing the subtle hue shifts in skies and foliage was tricky as well but I tried my best to apply all of Tiffanie’s tips. I added some imagination on top of some references. In thumbnail #2 for example, I thought it would be nice to “lower” the background trees a bit and make the sky more visible. The software I used is Photoshop. My main tools were selection tools (marquee & lasso), smudge tool, full opacity round brush, as well as a chalky brush for initial blocking and big swooping motions. Reference pictures are all from my home country Morocco. I hope you like my work, thank you! :)

Barely made it, but I made it!

Hello! First I want to say that this was a very intersting approach I will continue doing and even though I played it secure and did it digitally I also got motivated to get an easel and clean the dust off my gouaches. So definetely will be doing plein air this year.. About the entry itself I took the opportunity to write a couple of verses for each image so it could fulfill the storytelling part of it. Thank you for the challenge and greetings from Colombia!

Hi, These are my first attempts, I read that we coud enter more than once, if that is not so, please use my entry below. Using my own Photography, Geneva Lake, weather has limited onsite painting. I used M Graham Gouache on bristol board 2x2. Enjoyed the challenge and seeing everyones entries and how they work. Thank You again.

Hey guys, for this challenge I painted a Wild Western theme. The idea is that a man is on his wits end; looking for some kind of hope after loosing the love of his life. He’s always lived on his family farm near a train station and would always see it pass by; wondering what lies beyond the rail road tracks. The man gets tired of being in the house and just starts walking. Every scene reminds him of a wonderful moment he shared with her. This was my first time using Gouache and had a lot of fun with it! Thanks you!

Thank you for this challenge, I've had a lot of fun painting dreamy landscape and looking at all the amazing work here, will be doing more gouache for sure. Couldn't really do Santorini justice though!

Hi everyone, here is my submission for this challenge. All the pictures are from a friend of mine who is a travel blogger. She has an eye for photography and always shoots beautiful landscapes. Thanks to James Gurney, I started gouache painting a few weeks ago so I gave this challenge a try with gouache. I was fun and helpful, I will definitely add this exercice more often to my painting routine.

Hello! These are 5 views from and around Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area on the Oregon Coast. It’s a beautiful place with lots of sea birds and marine creatures. This was a fun challenge! Gouache, 1” flat brush and #10 round. Red ochre, yellow ochre, ultramarine blue, zinc white, permanent white with some primary green middle and primary blue (cyan). The bottom right was done plein air which actually made it easier to simplify the shapes.