Hi Glenn, many thanks for your reply.
I’m glad that you’re a kind of person who doesn’t get upset with critiques which include some suggestions for improvements. When I was working as a manager I’ve seen some people…actually not a few people who took almost anything personally and got pretty readily upset whenever they got some “negative” feedback on their performance. So I’ve become pretty careful about giving feedback to others and mostly I simply don’t because as long as you keep your mouth shut, you’ll never get hated. But when I saw how you introduced your work here, I thought probably you would be OK with feedbacks provided that they are of any use for you.
I am also glad that you know how you can train yourself by giving yourself hard subjects from the beginning. I remember one of my Pilates mentors who would basically disagree with movements modifications for Pilates beginners. I myself am a Pilates instructor licensed from a US Pilates organisation, and while in my training course in the US I learned many, many movements modifications patterns, i.e. how you can make the required Pilates movements easier for the beginners. The mentor I mentioned was not happy with the idea of changing the movements because she thought that by “trying” to do the original unmodified movements people get closer to the benefits of practicing Pilates. How perfectly they can perform the movements are not critical. That was her belief. I think this applies to art training as well; by tackling difficult, but also personally intriguing subjects, you can develop a very helpful habit of analysing the subjects to devise the best approach to creating a successful artworks. Probably you will fail, which is not critical, because every time you fail, you can just take it as an opportunity to develop your self-critique mindset and recovery skills at the same time. Most importantly, these things can not be taught, but are necessary to acquire for your long-term growth.
Lastly, I would like to share my ideas about the use of photo reference. I don’t use the reference photos as they are. The reasons for this are:
a) In most cases, I am not the one who took the photo so I cannot claim that the artworks basically replicating the reference photos are purely my original. The choice of subjects, scenes, compositions etc. are not my ideas but the photographer’s. These sort of artworks can be acceptable as only practice pieces which you don’t exhibit in your shows or sell as your original works. But I’m not interested in producing practice pieces and I don’t have the time to do that either. I focus on creating only original works so I cannot use the photos as they are if taken by someone else but me myself.
b) I have not found a single photograph about which I felt I wanted to replicate without changing anything in the photo. I always have my own ideas about what I would like to show on the picture plane and no existing photos which materialize my potential visions can be found. Perhaps this is because I left photography and shifted to computer graphics and then drawings.
So, what I usually do with reference photos is to select relevant multiple photos and combine them digitally to prepare my final reference photo I can actually use for my drawings. Even the combined reference photos are not satisfactory in most cases because some parts are too dark, some unnecessary objects are included etc. like you mention regarding your reference photo of the barn. So I edit the final reference using photoshop to remove unwanted things, adjust the values etc. until I feel confident that the photo will work fine as reference.
Here is an example of how I have prepared the final reference for “my life as a cat”:
I selected these photos first. The red circles are portions I wanted to use:
I added these portions to this photo:
This is the final reference.
But you can see that I changed so many things in my drawings by comparing the reference and my drawing. Most of these changes have been improvised.
I don’t know how many of Matt’s critique videos you’ve already watched, but I myself watched all the episodes without skipping anything when I became a Virtual Instructor member a few years ago. He takes a structured critique approach to all the artworks submitted to the Member’s Minute and therefore there are many, many repetitions you hear throughout the entire episodes. But he sometimes says something which he does not repeat in other episodes and I’ve found those bit of remarks very very important and inspirational. Unfortunately I don’t remember which episode that was, but he once said he did not want you to send the reference photo because he looks at your artwork as it is, not as the replica of the reference photo. Tell you the truth, I took this remark very seriously because I interpreted this like “don’t let your reference photos have control over your original artworks”. It is not like your artwork is rated high or low by how close your work is to the reference photo. You’re the one who utilize the reference photos for the purpose of achieving your goal to materialize what you originally wanted to express, and not the other way around.
Sorry, it’s become soooooo long!
I hope any of what I wrote here is of some help for you 
