Finally after many more hours of work, the painting is about finished. There are still a few small areas here and there that I'll probably do some work to and I want to also work on the foreground a little. As mentioned earlier, this one really took much longer than expected. One area I struggled with was in the lower doorway. Initially I wanted to include a landscape that you could see through the open holes on the other side of the barn (see last post). But this really didn't work out for a number of reasons. I was a bit unsure exactly how to proceed with this area right from the start and this held up the painting significantly. After some thought, I first cut out some paper shapes to match those of the holes in the rear wall. This way I could get a general idea how things would look without permanently putting in something that I wished I had not. A few different landscapes were then painted on the shapes and attached to the painting in turn. The landscapes themselves were fine but when added to the painting, they distracted too much from the overall work. And it didn't seem to matter what I put in there, the eye went straight to that point which was really not what I wanted. To me, the painting is about the light and shadows on the side of the barn and the old bucket on the second floor. Anything else would be a distraction so I decided to fill in the broken out parts with boards. There is still a hint of things behind the barn but this I felt was a much better way to go. Often a simple direct statement is better than too many points of interest. Anyway, I was happy at last and glad to see it finished (for now anyway). I still don't think that I have exhausted this subject in any form and have a number of ideas that I still want to try. Abandoned Barn - Afternoon Sun II is 30" X 22".