Back Into Bristol

Went into town again today to do more sketching. Began the day by hanging out on Christmas steps to draw the narrow, steep lane full of crooked old buildings. Did a graphite sketch [Sketchbook pp. 17-18 ] to warm up and took a few photos to do some more drawing later.

Later that evening at home i decided to have a go at doing a digital painting using the reference i had. For this piece i wanted to focus on capturing the light and the variety of warmness and coolness of colours.

I kept my mark making loose and took time to decide what i wanted to add and remove in the composition. This was a 30 min painting so it is simplified but the majority of the work was put into correctly capturing the strong light on the tops of the buildings. I am still evaluating how minimal i can go with my mark making while retaining a sufficient amount of detail in forms for the audience to understand what they are looking at. For a rather short study i am very happy with how the painting turned out and even though i made the decision to simplify things down, there seems to be a sense of realism about the piece, which i believe comes through the correct depiction of the light in the scene.

The painting has atmosphere and the intensity of the light comes across well by over exposing objects like the chimneys and roof windows.

I have been continuing to educate myself on how to apply warmth and coolness to colours and this is really helping my understanding of lighting. For shadows, instead of using shades of black, i now use dark blues. I find this preserves the colour better and also it gives a sense of coolness to the shade. For highlights i now feel more comfortable with pushing colours to almost if not white to show the intensity of the light. I also overlay a wash of a warm tone of red or orange to depict the warmth coming from the light. I feel that i have used these new techniques successfully, if you compare the bottom of the buildings to the top you can compare the temperature of colours.

The temperature that comes through the paintings are the temperatures i experienced when i was physically out on location. It was rather cold sitting in the alley and sketching.

I plan to develop and apply these techniques to more refined paintings in the future.