Ongoing Work and Striving to Improve.

I am getting into a routine now of painting a few hours every day or so, something which I wasn't doing in the past. As always it's a time availability thing. Lately if I go two days or so without working on art it's unusual. How long this will continue I don't know. I am looking at a lot of aspects of my painting technique and dissecting everything now in my ongoing attempts to refine and improve. I am questioning everything I use, brushes, canvas, brushstrokes, everything...I bought new canvases with a smoother surface and it is definitely helping. Also I am reading and learning from techniques used by any artists who have refined their painting technique. One such artist is James Ingraham. Check out his videos on You tube. He posts as Jimmy3d. The above is a shot of my latest work in progress. It's going okay but still needs a lot of work. I will post more when it's finished. I underpainted the canvas and let it dry before I drew on the drawing. I spent several hours working on creating the drawing on parchment paper before I had the final image decided upon. I created the drawing on the canvas by using thin markers which are waterproof. I used skyblue marker for the lines in the sky area and raw umber marker for the rest. The paint is covering the markers okay, so seems to be working out. I hadn't used this way of creating the initial drawing before. The underpainting is ultramarine blue with prussian blue and titanium white in varying proportions. More white is used and less ultramarine as I went down the canvas. It gets rid of the blank white of the canvas and creates a good base for the overall colour of the painting. That's it for the moment. I intend to finish it soon so check back over the next week or so to see the final result.