@gailb Wow, how many photographers wish they could have been in the darkroom with Ansel Adams... what a learning experience. What he did well was to find abstract patterns in nature and photograph them, and then develop and print the photos with magical light in them. If you apply that thinking to your paintings, you'll make interesting compositions. Good representational art work also has a good abstract pattern in it that attracts the eye first before you see what the details are. Don't be afraid that you can't paint something the way you want to.... all artists face that, just do your best. It's OK to fail, and you're going to learn a lot about success by failing at your experiments. You don't have to put any expectations on yourself about showing it to other people while you are painting, just be in your zone and consider that to be your safe place of refuge where you can play and experiment. Keep at it and you'll see your artistic abilities grow, and always learn by looking at work by the masters and figure out how they did something. You do need drawing ability behind your representational paintings that will help you judge if your brush strokes are in the right place and correctly representing the mass and structure of the subject.