Black & white revisited

I am thinking that the problem with photographing this painting is its size- or it could just be me. But you can still see how much I changed it from the first try at adding color; I decided to play with breaking up all the grass. I am much happier with the new color on the chairs. I also darkened the house on the right and lightened the house in the middle. Not using any reference frees you up to orchestrate the painting. I missed the follow-up class critique for this exercise because I so wanted to paint the fall colors at Big Bend while it lasted. I did show the painting to Kevin this past Saturday and his comment was: I lost the local tone aspect of it. Especially on the two buildings towards the right and my grass, sigh. Which translates to: the value shift from one side of the building to the other is too great. Those buildings are reading as light and shadow. The original B&W version had basically three values and I have gotten away from that. Local tone essentially flattens out a scene. Back to the drawing board. Luckily, this was a test run and I still have two other B&W paintings to add color to.