back to basics

Over the past couple of weeks I've been working with my mentor on exercises that have helped me really understand some basic principles of picture making.  Some of these are really basic art school stuff, some I've done before and others I haven't but felt that I understood the concept well enough that there was no need for me to do it.  But, going through these exercises I realized just how little I really was grasping these principles.  It's one thing to talk about something and another thing to actually do it, and you won't learn until you actually do.
These are some of the recent exercises I've done:

 
Like I said basic stuff, like foundational art school stuff, but I've come to these with a different mindset and really appreciate what one learns from them.  


Here is a clear example of what I guess I'm trying to say.  The first two images below where painted during my 2nd year in college in my color theory class (that was the first time I used gouache and hated it)  

laughable to me now (thats suppose to be an apple!)  But I wasn't really grasping what I was to learn later on (maybe except that the backgrounds were complementary colors) The images below were created recently, they're not perfect, however they illustrate my learning curve: 

When my mentor gave me this assignment, I thought it was going to be easy and I'd be able to bang them out quickly, but they were actually kind of challenging, and because of that I felt like I was learning something while doing them.  

Anyway boring post, I just thought I'd share that. the end.