Hey Malcolm, I absolutely love your classes. You're an excellent instructor and one of my favorites on Skillshare. I'm a self-taught artist and have only started painting over the past year. I started with watercolor but have mostly been painting with acrylics since last summer.This is my first venture into oils. I so badly want to loosen up my painting style but it's a real struggle. I watched the course all the way through before attempting it. Everything went well as I was watching you and listening to you while painting, but then I decided to switch over solely to working with the reference photo and that's when it all went downhill. I started to get tight and got sucked into all the fine details. I've attached a photo of one of my recent paintings so you can see what comes naturally from me (which is "tight-ass", not necessarily the style I want to move forward with, or at least not all the time). I just can't seem to break free from painting exactly what I see. In addition, (and this is probably also due to me being a "tight-ass" haha), your little flicks with the brush for the leaves and flowers look so effortless yet when I try to do that the result is not the same (it doesn't look random or effortless), so then I try to "place" them so it looks random but it only looks unnatural and forced. I'm really frustrated and was wondering if there's any advice you can give me based on looking at my attempted piece from this class. I don't hate it, but there are quite a few things I'm not happy with. There's no doubt you'll notice all the issues I had, especially with the shadows because I tried to redo them and in that process learned a lot about the difference of painting with oils...it's REAL hard to come back and paint darks over lights!! LOL