Dupont Roses, 20″ x 16″, UART 320

Underpainting, stage 1

Underpainting, stage 2

Painting, stage 1

Painting, what I thought was done

I spent yesterday in the studio with several long-time friends and fellow pastel artists.  I put the finishing touches on a painting I started some weeks ago, before our trip to Colorado.  I had thought it was done and had filmed it. But when I looked at the image, I knew that I wasn’t happy with it.

After my last quickly drawn painting, I spent more time with the drawing.  But I went pretty fast with the underpainting! Pretty ugly I think!  But it did the trick. You can see that with the alcohol, all the major shapes are there and clearly defined, even though I used my new technique of brushing it down with a lot of alcohol.

In real life, the roses are a deep cool red and the stairway is an uninteresting puce-like color.  With the red orange in the building and brick wall, I just instinctively went for the blue greens for the stairs. And I decided to make the roses more of a red orange as well.  For the doorway in the back, I painted it very loosely and simply.  There were two complicated light fixtures on either side, which I removed.

I completed the painting up to “painting stage 1” and came back another day.  I knew that i didn’t like the yellow I had used in the door frame.  It didn’t go with the orange at all. So I used a light Ludwig orange to got rid of the yellow.  Much happier!  I then worked on the greenery.  I didn’t have my Ipad on that day and only had a B&W photo. So I couldn’t see where the roses actually were.  When I looked at the color image again, I realized that there were roses lower down which added to the curvature of the colors leading up to the green vine.

My goal yesterday was to tone down the blue green stairs, add the additional roses, change the color of the sidewalk (which was too much like the brick wall) and complete the roses and highlights on the greens.  I used some warm neutral Schminkes in several values to add a brownish tone to the large part of the stairway on the left. I used the same color in the brick walk.  I didn’t change the rest of the stairway  at all, but I felt that this made enough of a difference.  It wasn’t quite so “in my face”!  I added some lighter, brighter orange to the brick near the doorway.  (By the way, this is an English basement and there is a slightly lighter area of color in it with an arc of dark above. You have to look hard to see it in the photo, but it’s clearly there in the painting.  I’m aiming to paint some of the buildings with English basements as they are one of the defining characteristics of Dupont Circle.)

The reddish wall is too bright in the photo, a common problem of photography (and this isn’t digital!).

I began a new painting yesterday of a lavender building with a yellow one next to it.  Nice complements!  Will get back to it later this week.

Happy 4th of July to you all. It’s a wonderful holiday, despite someone’s efforts to turn it into self aggrandizement!