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Does this sound familiar? You chose your subject matter carefully and thoughtfully; perhaps you did some preparatory sketches; you knew you had a very strong image in the making and were eager to get started. The rough-in was a breeze and your excitement mounted. Then you applied yourself to the hard work, staying faithful and determined through the inevitable messiness of the middle stages of progress: you knew in your heart this was going to be a winner! You move on to the finishing touches.

Then -- Oh no! What happened?!?

No bang, just fizzle. Your beautiful image ends as a rather dead-looking painting, a clunker. So, indeed, what happened? Happily, there are fixes for paintings that fail to arrive at their full potential.

What follows is a checklist of common -- and thankfully, correctable -- errors that we make as learners of our craft. The order is random because very few people make all these mistakes, and one person's weakness is another one's strength. But these are common problems I often see, and sometimes encounter myself. You might say it's my own checklist to go through when I have a problem painting.

1) Is your range of values broad enough? A common mistake is to truncate the range of values, keeping everything in the middle values: nothing too bright and nothing too dark. Pretty boring. If that's your problem, maybe you're playing it too safe? On the other hand, it's also possible to go to the extremes of light and dark -- because high contrast is exciting! -- and neglect those mundane but foundational middle values. So, look at your painting and ask yourself if you've shortchanged any part of the value scale.

2) Is the color temperature of your image consistent? Perhaps you started with a scene that had warm direct light and cool shadows (as on a sunny day), but you failed to stay consistent with that sort of light. All four corners of your surface should appear to be lighted by the same light. Strange deviations from that overall light can muddle an image. One way to avoid this problem is to paint from a limited palette from the very start.

3) What is your eye's instinct telling you? Sometimes our brains get in the way of what our eye is telling us we need to do. I recently was working on a summer scene with a mass of trees. My brain was saying, "Summer leaves are green; autumn leaves are red," even as my visual instincts were telling me, "You've got to lard some red into those green trees! They're too cold." For a long time I couldn't get past my brain. But when the image persisted in looking bad I finally got fed up enough to attack those green trees with deep red shadows. Suddenly that part of the painting fell into place with the rest of the image. My fear that it would look unnatural proved unfounded: those trees came to life.  Sometimes our visual instincts will tells us that a certain line is out of place or runs at the wrong angle; or perhaps a patch of sunlight needs to be moved over to the left or right. Be open to making such changes.

4) Have you over-modeled or hyper-delineated your forms? I see this a lot in paintings that depict a meandering road or stream running away from the viewer toward the horizon. Such subject matter has strong appeal because it creates an unmistakable sense of linear perspective that draws the viewer into the scene. That it's "unmistakable" is precisely the problem: it dominates the scene, over-explains where the eye is to go, and sucks the life out of every other element in the scene. You will have to employ some "lost-and-found" edges or let your road dip out of sight here and there to get it under control. Otherwise your painting will say, "Here's a river (or a road), and that's all there is to this scene." And the viewer will be done looking at your painting in two seconds. Don't worry if something stays undefined; it's not going to leave your viewer bewildered. If anything it will cause them to linger a bit. Look around you at the real world: the only thing you see that's defined is the one thing that holds your attention more than anything else. The rest is a blur. Go ahead and focus at your focal point; let the rest of your image go soft.

5) Have you included contrasts? I just mentioned sharp focus and soft focus. And a full range of lights and darks. You could add color contrast, as in working red into a green tree. Cool and warm tones. Thin lines and broad gradations. Contrasts of all sorts keep an image interesting.

6) Finally, a brief word about how we choose our subject matter in the first place. One problem we must all overcome is viewing our potential subject matter with what I call "the romantic eye." That is, we don't really see what we're looking at; we read into a scene more beauty and drama and dazzle than is really there. This tendency repeats itself at the rough-in stage of painting: our washy, vague image is so simple we see it with the eye of a teenager who has just fallen in love -- there's far more fantasy than reality there. We must try to be sober and realistic about our subject matter. Furthermore, we must also be aware of our fears. We often will shy away from "complicated" scenes, telling ourselves a few large, simple forms will make a better statement in the final analysis. So we imagine. But how many of us can grasp that fantasy reading of our scene and faithfully reproduce it in paint?  It takes a huge talent to hold an imagined scene in one's head throughout the painting process so as to capture it satisfactorily on canvas. So, we must choose our subject matter soberly, with our eyes wide open, but we must also be prepared to stretch ourselves and not cow before challenging subject matter.

I hope this advice from one learner to other learners will prove helpful when a promising painting seems to come up short. You're certainly not alone when you experience disappointment after a rush of excitement. The important thing to remember is that there are fixes to most of the problems we encounter.