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This painting is a good example of happens when not maintaining consistent value relationships throughout the painting.

This was my first attempt at a rather complicated painting using 7 reference photos.  As opposed to the portraits and figures that I paint free hand with a brush, this one was created with tracing the shack and figures from photo references...I know, not the most artistic, but it's effective.  I had a photo reference for the buildings and a separate one for the dog, child at the top of the stairs, old woman sitting, girl carrying the baby, the man inside the room, and the trees in the background.  I cropped the figures from the photos and printed out the pictures.  This takes a few iterations to get the sizes correct.  I then used carbon paper to trace the drawing onto the canvas.

1.  This is the initial underpainting after everything was traced onto the canvas.  Initial massing of light and shadow areas.

2.  Started adding in color rather haphazardly.  I really did not know how to approach adding since this was a more complicated painting than I am used to doing.  

3.  Once I realized I could not bounce around to make this work I simply started working in a "Z" pattern from top left to bottom right, slowly and painstakingly painting each area.

4.  Last was adding in the sky and trees over the shack.

I learned a lot from this painting.  I got a little cocky with my ability to paint without much of a value study first and it bit me.  Also, piecemealing the painting together without taking a step back to see how each section I was focused on blended into the whole painting caused this one to fail.

...lesson's learned, moving on to other paintings.