There's much to be said for leaving things be: I felt a recent painting of mine was a bit too grey and chalky, and one of our number agreed. So I approached it with a glaze, and this time I think it worked - I won't bother to show the revised version, I think, because I frankly doubt you'd notice the difference; there is a change, but it's subtle (it nearly wasn't: I was about to make a major change and stopped myself; what, after all, was I striving for - perfection? That doesn't lie within my power: so I backed off). There was a Victorian painter whose name I could dredge up if I tried hard ... I tried hard: Edwin Austin Abbey, RA, 1852 - 1911. His painting "O Mistress Mine" (a fabulous thing, if you get the chance to see it) was changed after it was hung in the Royal Academy. Abbey was an avid collector of richly coloured draperies, and completely re-painted the lining of the sleeves of the uncertain mistress. Whether he improved it or not, not having seen the original, I don't know. I suspect however that he might have done just as well to have left it alone. His painting was one of those Victorian whoppers, a massive thing in, doubtless, an ornate gilt frame. Mine a modest matter of inches rather than feet - our predecessors tended to paint by the yard. All the more reason not to muck about with mine, though, really - at this sort of scale, once you've said what you wanted to say, you're rarely going to improve matters by niggling away at it. If you always knew, from the outset, that a glaze or two would be required on an oil painting - well that's fine; that's the way you planned it. But if it's a question of trying to turn a painting round that hasn't quite worked, I feel that it's nearly always better to leave it, and - if you want to - just try it again. Put the old picture away, go back to your sketch or whatever - or back to the scene - and simply tackle it afresh. Otherwise, you can find yourself turning into a bit of an obsessive - worrying away at a canvas, adding a bit here, a bit there, until you get it "right": the snag is, you probably never will get it right: if you knew what "right" was, you'd have got there first time round. I'm talking to myself here really, of course: telling myself if in doubt, don't. But maybe it'll benefit others as well, one can but hope. The more you work on an oil, the less fresh it gets - and you can work on them, as you certainly can't with watercolours, for years if you want to (there are one or two technical issues there, which might make this ill-advised, but provided you know what you're doing you can keep on keeping on until the brush drops from your palsied fingers: aesthetically though - it's hardly ever going to be successful). May I end this blog post - at the risk of making it sound like the End of the First Lesson - by paying tribute to our indefatigable moderator and website manager, Dawn Farley? (Well of course I may, who's going to stop me?) Through thick and thin, brickbats and bouquets, Dawn works to make the blog pages and the forum free of spam - thus improving the experience of posting here for everyone: and every now and then (not too often: not good for her) she deserves a bit of recognition for her efforts and perhaps a nice slice of cake. The spammers are a flaming nuisance, and Dawn quietly and unobtrusively just brushes them out of the way for us. So - let's hear it for Dawn, without whom this site would be much less of a pleasure to use, if it existed at all! We owe her a lot. Stop blushing, Dawn, and eat your cake.