Thank you for the award! I'm so excited to try out some new brushes! Thank you for hosting. It was a fun challenge and I've continued painting thumbnails. They are so helpful and easy to do with limited time.

Hello! This is my submission for the January Proko challenge! Love letters to the lonesome blues of winter, January 22. medium - oils on 2x2 Mdf boards and the reference images used!

Hi all, my name is Julia Kamenskikh, and this is my official entry for #prokochallenge organized by @tiffaniemangart and @prokotv Five tiny paintings, all sized by 2 in x 2 in. Painted with gouache and 3/4 in brush. And I think those are the smallest paintings ever done before. And cannot express how much I’ve enjoyed it. You are forced to simplify and it feels like solving a puzzle to me. I will be definitely doing these again, thank you Tiffany for such a great idea and all organizers for organizing this! All photos are taken by me.

Hi all! Here are my submissions and references. Really enjoyed the challenge. Thank you :)

Hi all. First I thank Proko & Tiffanie for giving us this great challenge. I made 5 thumbnails based on my own photography of my county landscapes throughout all seasons. 2x2", acrylics. I had a great time painting those thumbs!

I found myself in an interesting position where I had to create square thumbnails out of portrait-formatted pictures. I enjoyed using the polygonal lasso tool, I like the angular energy it gives to these pieces. I also forbade myself from using the color picker on the references, since I want to get better at eyeballing vivid colors.

Here is my collection of five mini landscapes for the Tiffanie Mang-Proko challenge! These are all done in gouache from a combination of direct observation and memory. I used only a 3/4 inch flat brush and a medium-sized, pointed round, and sometimes a colored pencil. Here are some goals I had: I wanted to paint all of these from life, around my home. I wanted each to present a different challenge (how do you paint a scene in pitch black for example? Or in freezing cold? Bright light? Fleeting light? etc.) I tried to simplify the scenes, using cleaner sweeps of the brush, keeping a little focused detail only where necessary. I hoped for each painting to stand on its own, but also as part of a cohesive set. I found interesting ways to accomplish these goals. For example, using dry media to start in the cold weather (to avoid frozen paint), or working partly from memory in the case of the darker scenes. This was one of my favorite challenges so far. I hope you enjoyed it too! Please leave a comment if you like.

Hello, here are my 5 submissions! As a character artist, this challenge helped me conquer my fear of landscape painting haha. I was able to really push the way I see values, hue shifts, and big masses. Simplifying rocks into simple shapes was pretty challenging and seeing the subtle hue shifts in skies and foliage was tricky as well but I tried my best to apply all of Tiffanie’s tips. I added some imagination on top of some references. In thumbnail #2 for example, I thought it would be nice to “lower” the background trees a bit and make the sky more visible. The software I used is Photoshop. My main tools were selection tools (marquee & lasso), smudge tool, full opacity round brush, as well as a chalky brush for initial blocking and big swooping motions. Reference pictures are all from my home country Morocco. I hope you like my work, thank you! :)

Barely made it, but I made it!