C & O Canal, Georgetown, #2

I completed a second painting from the canal in Georgetown this week and have begun my third. This one posed some compositional challenges to begin with. The tower was right in the middle of the picture and it didn’t go off the top. I decided to move it to the left and liked the composition much better. But then I had to make up much of the building to its right! There were other challenges as well. The windows on the left were very detailed and I decided to put them in with hard pastel and not apply any alcohol. So these were primarily done with hard pastel alone. The reflection of the windows at bottom gave me real problems. They were quite dark and blue looking and didn’t show any of the building reflected in the windows at top. I tried various blues that just didn’t work. Finally, I found the one dark teal pastel that I had in my box and voila! It looked great! It was a darker version of the aqua at top and now makes sense. And I love the combination of the red violet and the dark teal green.

The reflected light under the windows is a really nice feature of the photo and I tried to get it and its reflections as accurate as possible. This painting is more industrial and doesn’t feature any of the tow path, but I like the revised composition and the color scheme. I’m finding this series to be demanding but interesting and a good challenge for winter, when the landscape is not so exciting.