Saturday, August 4, 2018

Street Festival or a Study in Light and Shadow

Street Festival
24 x 35 inches gallery wrapped canvas
Acrylic paints
My own primary source photo

This is a bitty blog post about a really BIG (for me anyway) painting. I decided I wanted to do a city scape painting with dramatic shadows and this old photo I had,fit the bill. I did some judicious rearranging of a few of the elements to get the “look” I wanted and began painting.

I first laid in big blocks of flat colour using a lotta really dark red for the shadowed side of the building. I used a T square to reddi-up the white window frames and doors.

After laying in the shadowed windows, I went over with a roller brush, the really dark shadows of the building with a muted brick red. I wanted the brick texture without details. This was going to be glazed over in the final steps of the painting.

To establish the lightest lights of the painting I turned to the background buildings which were in direct sunlight. I painted in just enough of the buildings details to establish the 3D-ness of the buildings....but not much else.

Towards the end of the painting I experimented with a lighter tone for the foreground pavement. It looked “OK”......but I'd lost the drama! So as I finished up the crowd under the blue awning and the foreground people.....I quickly switched back to a really dark foreground pavement colour, and got back my “POP”!

I finished things off with multiple dark glazes in the deeply shadowed areas with a few bright and light colour highlights, like the red tent and the toddler's balloon as he rides on his daddy's shoulders.

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