Painting

I am enrolled in a painting class this fall, so by the end of the week I will be learning to paint. In one of my intro art classes we were told that naive or untrained artists have a freer take on things (or some such) and that trained artists operate within the framework of knowledge of art history, composition, and conventions, even when they reject these things in a piece their work is then being informed by the conventions. So. I am doing a painting as a "before" training exercise, even though I have made a lot of paintings this one is not based on a photo or purely invented, I drew upon images from my sketchbook and made a composite. Sort of. It is unfinished but I hung it up in my dorm already.
My friend Max took this photo, and even though the light is bad and there is clutter I really like it.
Here I have started the gradiated sky.
Oh dear. I thought I had a better picture of it, showing the leaping animals and everything, but it did not make it on to my flashdrive (I am on a library computer because my laptop hasn't internet. Possibly I should have brought it to the library to connect it to this internet but it was lovely to walk to the library unencumbered)