Drawing the buildings

 

Since I regularly don't (or avoiding) paint any man-made objects like buildings, It's difficult to draw them even with the grids at the base layer. Even at this stage I keep finding those shapes are unproportional, or tilted one way or the other, or smaller shapes are shoved to one side. 
Then ultimately I need to decide how much details I want to put in while those are NOT primary focus. I wish I could put thick paint boldly on then don't have to touch any more just like those impressionists did. Just a dream.

roughly filled mountains

 

filled the mountains and adjusting roofs of buildings. They should be a little more leaning left.

Early Morning at Zermatt

 Finally started painting a new piece for this year. It's from a photo I took in front of my hotel at Zermatt, Switzerland two years ago. I liked the contrast between the half moon and the Matterhorn. Moved the moon to right to fits in a vertical format. 
With this piece, I want to experiment leaving sharp contour lines. You can see I created grids on canvas. Also a figure on a bike is in. Don't remember when last time I painted something with a figure. Probably those girls on horses almost 10 year ago? Not sure how it would end at this moment.  

Last update for Sunset Painting

 

I feel I wouldn't be able to improve the sky any more. I still want to touch more on the water, them I might put more highlights on the clouds, which I'm not sure if it would do anything good at this moment.

Layers of sky, furthest fist

 

Since the sky area is layered, started defining colors and shapes of the furthest, which is the sky colors, then darker clouds and then lighter purple clouds, and so on.

Changing the direction

 

Based on the pace of what I've been doing on the sky and clouds, I've determined I wouldn't be able to finish this painting by my target date. So I'm changing the course slightly. I'm now making the edges of shapes sharper and straighter without blurring them with softer brushstrokes. Look at the right edges of those high clouds. Looking more like geometric shapes. That's fine to me. I'll keep curving them out by defining negative spaces/shapes with straight edges.
I don't have much expectation how the end result would be now.

 Sharpened the edges of the dark ground against water and sky. Then adjusted/added colors of the bottom of sky and the bottom band of orange clouds. This part contains the highest dark&light contrast of this painting.