The painting looks lovely and perfect the way it is @chessmonster but I'm not sure I could ever be comfortable with this style. I am never happy and always looking to add a detail here or there so it would be a nightmare for me to walk away and leave it 'unfinished'. :)
As for the upvoting, I am not really sure how things work in that regard myself and I don't seem to have one of these 'sliders' that everyone keeps mentioning so have no way to control my voting percentage. I just upvote evryone who comments and every post I like. :) My vote isn't worth much I'm afraid.:(
I came across this post by @beanz by way of @dreemits blog. Not sure if it is any help to you in finding that sweet spot or perhaps this is the post where you got the reference. :)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@beanz/experiment-review-finding-the-sweet-spot-on-the-voting-scale
Hope you are having an excellent day yourself!
There's a book, "Hawthorne On Painting," by Charles W. Hawthorne. My favorite art book is "The Art Spirit" by Robert Henri. Hawthorne's book is my #2 favorite. It's a thin paperback and not very expensive. (Both of these books can be purchased for around $20!) I recommend them highly for anyone who tries to "finish" their art, which is a curse: no artwork is ever finished - they only stop in good places! ha ha...I think I got that from Hawthorne! Maybe these books will be of value to you.
And yes I read the @beanz post but didn't devise a plan from it so I'm using my own. So I'll see what happens with it. I believe you'll get your slider after you've been on Steemit for awhile, although I don't know how that works exactly.
I did see somewhere that you get a slider when your account balance reaches $500 so hopefully it won't be too long.:)
I'm going to try to enter this weeks artstyleart contest and do a painting for that so we'll see how it turns out. I actually got back into drawing because I started oil painting and it wasn't working out too well so decided to go back to the drawing to get my confidence back first before doing another painting. It's probably time I branched out a bit now! :)
Thanks for the book recommendations. I will have a look at them.
Enjoy the rest of your day @chessmonster!