Painting in monotone

This is my 3rd picture for Fiona's class: 

We are going to be looking at 2 COIs. I have been thinking about it and decided that the house can be the main one and the snow covered mountain at the back be the second. 

Before attempting the main picture I decided to paint a smaller monotone sketch of it first, 9”x 6”, just to  get a clearer idea of colour values. I used Payne Grey and made a value chart.  My own criticism of this picture is that I should have used more colour on the whole. I think I was nervous that I may mess the picture. I started with the walls, but realized that I should have possibly started with the snow covered slopes at the back. I also needed to give more contrasts for the snow at the back I think. It took me about 2 hours to complete this sketch. I waited for paint to dry and painted in layers….another first for me! This is the result:

Boats revisited!

This is the 2nd picture I have worked on in Fiona's class. We used the earlier lessons of deciding on the COI and also the palette and colour values, to get ready to start this painting. I give the reference picture first:

Ona suggested I mix greys from other colours and put me on to a link at Wet canvas. So I practiced some greys and made some value strips, which looked like this:

After this I made the value strips of the colours I thought I would use and that came out like this:

I then drew the picture on Cansons 300 gsm paper (rough) 15 X 11"

I then painted the first picture which looks like this:

I wasn't too happy with the picture because I felt I hadn't got the feeling of distance as well as I wanted to and the misty feeling was definitely missing. Ona shared 'a technique you can use is to glaze over everything in the distance apart from your COI with a clear wash of water a couple times, letting it dry in between. You could even add a glaze or two of a pale blue again after this if it still needs a bit of misting. Washes over the top of detail help to soften the edges and create a more misty/smoky/distant feel'.
What an amazing technique....as I did just that and the final picture has come out as I wanted it and is given below: