Hey Gail thanks for submitting this sketch. I love the long horizontal format. However I do Have some suggestions. Long narrow painting are very challanging to compose. Now your basic composition is good but we can improve on it. First of all you need to make one of the most distant mountains more dominate. The very distant peak just to the right of center would be a good one to make a little taller and slightly bigger . This gives you a feature piece to build your composition around. The other ones you can leave them as they are. Just be sure you get the values correct when you paint them. The next thing is you have too large of an area of negative right in the center and with that much snow it wont be very interesting. Believe it or not this is an easy fix. All you have to do is move the buildings, road, fences and pine trees over closer to the right of center. Basically just below the larger mountain peak that is going to be the feature. I would make some of the pine trees around the buildings a little taller. You can even add more if you want to in order to fill up the space. Just be careful to follow the negative space rules and overlap rules so that so that it dose not get too busy. The water feature is fine. I suggest you make the large pine tree on the left taller to break the plain of the mountain. Once you make these adustments dont be afraid to move things around to make sure you have good eye flow. This should get you started. This is going to be a fun painting. So I am anxious to see it develop. Good luck and God bless you. By the way be sure the perspective on your buildings is correct. I will be sure to guide you on that issue if I need to.
