Portland Cityscape

This is a 30x40 canvas. Getting this under painting worked out required 4 to 6 hours of pencil time and 4 hours of painting. This is a morning scene which will have lots of contrast when I get going on the color. I hope to keep the sky beyond more or less white with an overexposed feel. I painted in the sky in white to see what I might get out of it.
There is a lot of nice color in this scene.
It is easy to get overwhelmed with the level of detail, especially when working from a photograph. I have to keep backing up and squinting to make sure I get the major elements to read. I like to contrast the light and dark and give detail to things that pop in the image. Since there are no people in the image (can't believe this was actually the case, but it was) I will add detail in the signs to give some scale.

Orange Sign

Since Christmas, I have been renovating my basement, again. Hopefully this is the last time for a while.

Unfortunately I was not improving my studio space. It is the same as it has been.

I was very much missing the painting. The lack of painting was effecting me in a bad way. The art work has become much more of a mental health issue and going without makes me sad.

This is a painting that had been started many months ago. It has been sitting in the basement taunting me. "Finish Me! Finish Me!" it seemed to beg. I just let it sit there, festering.

While not one of my more inspiring pieces, I like how it came out. The name "Orange Sign" is because of the one orange sign in the middle of the painting. I used some of the same orange to accent the sky, which is fictitious, but the blank fields of blue (painted more blue/green) needed something to liven them up.

I have always been fascinated by the scale of these entangled over-pass structures. Crazy big they are.

I have seven blank canvases primed and tinted, ready for more action.