Working a painting

Here I started painting in the scene and it isn't a matter of just copying what you see in front of you it would then look like the photograph and this is what we don't want. How often do you take a photo of a scene and it is perfect, not very often. Even professional photographers crop and manipulate there works but we as artists can make changes to the composition, we can take out or put things in or alter them to our likeing.

Initially I used burnt umber to paint in the shapes and roughly painted in some colours diluted with turpentine so I wouldn't have to wait long for the paint to dry. It was a dull day with hardly any light and shade and there wasn't a cloud in the sky so here I painted in some clouds. Notice that they are on a diagonal pointing down to the scene and were purposely painted like this for a contrasting diagonal to the horizon line and road side.

A lot has happened here with all of the basic colours painted in and with a suggestion of motor vehicles. Can you see the two diagonal lines, one the horizon line and two the road side running parallel to each other, unfortunately I was painting this scene for a customer and he would have expected the painting to be like the scene so I really I could only make subtle changes to help the composition.

Nothing much has changed here only the windows painted in.

More detail has been added here and another big difference from the photo is the posts at the side of the road which looked ugly and insensitive so I modified them and put them in at different angles and sizes. The motorcars at each side of the picture are stoppers, stopping your eyes from wondering out of the picture. Other subtle differences are leaving out the telegraph posts and highering some of the distant trees so the diagonal line of the horizon wasn't just a straight line.


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