Looking over the Gallery, as I do every day - can't always stop to comment - I wondered what it really was that made me stop and pick out an individual painting..... I think it's contrast, between light and dark. We only see thumbnails until we click on an image,and of course they can be quite deceiving, sometimes making quite bad paintings look good, and good ones bland and uninteresting. So it's always worth taking a closer look at anything that just catches the eye, even if it does so quite subliminally. The paintings that work best for me, though, do include strong contrasts - and increasingly, I try to include these in my own work: while I'm sure it's benefiting, this may reflect no more than that my previous efforts had too few of them ... so I'm drawing no very firm lessons from this. Without contrast, though, you may have too little drama - and while you don't want melodrama (saw some oils a while ago enlivened by strikes of lightning: all very well,but it did look a bit like a stage set) you do want a variety of lights and darks in your paintings - the old idea of chiaroscuro, which has rescued many a bland painting (and here lies its principal danger as a technique). You want excitement, but also want to avoid it looking too contrived ........... not easy, but then this is what learning to paint is all about. http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk