My Attempt At A Huge Landscape Painting For The Dining Room

Last week, I showed y’all this landscape that ChatGPT created for me. While I really liked the overall idea, I actually didn’t want the real thing to be quite so bold. I wanted it a little softer (especially the clouds), and there were some other changes I wanted to make. But I thought this would be a good roadmap to have on hand as I created my own.

Here’s a better look at the ChatGPT version. Again, I really liked this, but I wanted to make some changes. The one that stood out to me the most was the sky, which seemed way too blue for my house. And overall, I wanted mine to be colorful, but this one seemed a little jarring for my taste. .

So here’s a look at the landscape I painted using that ChatGPT-created image as my inspiration.

I had really hoped to use a rectangle canvas, but I wanted it really big, and they were sold out of the 48″ x 60″ that I wanted. So I ended up going with this 48″ square canvas. The next problem was figuring out exactly where I was going to do this painting because the canvas is so large. So I ended up setting up right here in the dining room. That worked perfectly because I had the drapery fabric right there by me and I could have my computer on the floor next to me with my inspiration pictures on display.

I really had no idea where to start, but it made sense to me to literally start at the top and work my way to the bottom, so that’s what I did. I started with the sky. The funny thing is that I thought the clouds would be the hardest part of this painting and the mountains and foreground flowers would be the easiest part. The very opposite was true. The sky took me about 30 minutes. The rest of it took me all weekend. 😀

I was pretty proud of how the sky and clouds turned out, so I got a little overly confident at that point, thinking that the rest was going to be a breeze compared to the sky and clouds.

Well, I can’t even tell you how long it took me to sketch out the rest of the picture because I sketched, erased, sketched again, erased, sketched again, erased again. I thought I would never get it to look anything like the inspiration picture. But finally I decided that I couldn’t expect perfection, so I just went for it and started adding paint to my sketch.

I definitely hit some rough points where I had no idea what I was doing, but I just pushed through.

I also brought in the landscape from our bedroom so that I could have that inspiration on hand as well.

And again, I just kept working my way down to the bottom of the canvas. I really expected the flowers at the bottom to be the easiest part, but they weren’t. I had no idea what I was doing at first.

And I had no idea how to fix it, but I had gotten this far on my own.

So I just kept going and kept trying new things and new brush strokes until I happened upon a technique that resulted in something that I liked.

And once I reached the bottom of the canvas and stood back and looked, I was pretty darn proud of what I had created!

To be honest, I’m not even sure if it’s finished. I might go back and add some more color here and there. But for the most part, I think it’s finished.

It’s definitely not perfect, and as I told my mom, I know I have a lot to learn when it comes to painting landscapes. I know the perspective is off on parts of it, and I really just need a whole lot more practice. But overall, I’m really excited about how this turned out. Now I just need to make a frame for it and get it hung on the wall.