May 26, 2017

K Street in Georgetown

new painting in progress

original sketch
K Street in Georgetown is at water level; above it, the Whitehurst Freeway whisks cars past Georgetown traffic.  I've spend a lot of time under the freeway painting, and I went back to my other sketches and paintings to create a new painting of the site.  The views from each painting are different, some of which is due to where I set up my easel; other changes were made to compose the painting the way I wanted it.

The wall of the building that houses Ma Maison restaurant does have black paint on the upper half of its east-facing wall, but in the earlier sketch I found the black stripe and the prominent roadway girder right in front of it too intense and distracting.  In the painting I'm working on now, I've shifted the focus of the painting so you are led along K Street to its end.  I'll be working on more balance of the color and see how well I can add come variation into the deep shadow to add movement to the space.

May 5, 2017

Revisiting a Yellowstone Meadow

the second version of the scene 
This meadow is above Trout Pond in Yellowstone National Park.  The trail goes through the meadow and down to the pond.

I painted this scene first after visiting it last summer on a smallish canvas.  In my first painting of it, I shied away from the intense green of the meadow and I think the loss of a lush carpet of grasses and flowers made that first painting worth revisiting.   In this one, I let the saturated colors shine -- and although I painted it on a slightly larger canvas, I didn't go all out and paint this on a larger canvas.

Now with these two done, I think I may tackle a truly large painting of the scene.
this was the first painting of the scene