Tweaks

"Houses at the Lake" top before tweaking, bottom after tweaking

"Marsh at Forge Pond" top before tweaking, bottom after tweaking

I try to step back and review these plein air sketches on site, but often I'm on a tight schedule and don't have time to do it properly. So I'll do a tweak after the sketch dries. Above are two examples. In "Houses At The Lake", I wasn't happy with the house on the right, it felt like a uniform blob of orange. So I added some shadows, lightened the right side, and widened the door to break it up a bit. In "Marsh at Forge Pond", I felt that the bottom of the left most tree had two much contrast, drawing my eye there, and the pattern of light and shadow at the base of the trees was too uniform, like a checkerboard. Both issues were fixed in the tweak. The trick with tweaking is not to do too much and overwork, the freshness of the original is easy to lose.

What do you think? Do the tweaks improve the paintings?

Note: any difference in overall color is due to inconsistent photography, not tweaking.