C & O Canal, Georgetown, #6, 24 x 20, Pastel Premiere 400

Underpainting

 This is my final painting in the series of canal paintings. I used two different photos for this one. One was horizontal and closer up, featuring the light on the water, but also a whole lot of wall on the left that had little interest. The second was vertical with the building on right. I did two charcoal studies, horizontal and vertical and decided quickly on the vertical, but used the horizontal photo for the area of light on the water. The composition in this painting is unlike anything I’ve ever done, I must say!  The color was another challenge. The photos were very dark and spoke to me of red violet. But I really liked the varying colors in the windows from blue, to yellow green, to orange.  I did an underpainting using primarily greens with some red violets. It looked awful!  But it proved to be fine. When I started putting in the buildings, I began with a light magenta, but found it to be too bright. So I used red and blue violets on over it and it was much better. I used the complementary warm greens in the grass strip of the two path, and in the light on the water. I also added dark greens into the wall on the right.

Yesterday I gave a discussion on choosing a color palette to my Wednesday class in the studio. The unfinished painting was on the easel. We looked at the standard color wheel and the red violet/yellow green complementary palette. But there is more color here. Then we looked at the Analogous Color Wheel. Choosing purple as the primary color, I had a palette of red and blue violets, with a complement of green, and discords of yellow orange (windows and path) and blue green (sky, water, windows)!  Very interesting. It proves once again the usefulness of this color wheel.

This series has been a real challenge and it’s been fun. I’ve been creating unusual compositions and painting more industrial scenes. I’ve always liked this kind of subject matter but until now hadn’t found something I really wanted to paint.  I have to say that at this point I’m ready to return to a “pretty” landscape!  But I look forward to exploring more areas of DC and painting them.