Notre Dame WIP Day 3

Day 3 of the Notre Dame painting. I have done nothing but work on this thing. I'm making steady progress, which kinda surprises me. I was expecting some mishaps and obstacles by now. Well, I still have a long way to go, so knock on wood!

A little more paint on the roof.

Defining the little triangle shapes on the roof.

Here's a detail. By "define", I don't mean render it out tightly. I just want to get the shapes and the placement right. more or less. Fairly quickly done because it's not time to get into little detail just yet. So moving right along...

Here's another detail shot. The violet reflected light on the left buttress is pretty neat. But it'll get painted over, as everything does over the course of making a big process-oriented painting like this.

Looking pretty sketchy at this stage. If I were painting en plein air, (not that I could paint the Notre Dame en plein air if I tried) I'd consider this tight enough, and leave it alone.

More opaque paints on sunlit areas. Opacity really emphasizes sunlight. Any light, for that matter - reflected and ambient too.

Getting down to the ornamental stuff in the windows. This is tedious.

The center and the right windows now have the ornamentation. At this point, I'm defining the drawing, and light / shadow patterns. What I'm NOT looking for, YET, is accurate color and value. It may seem like I'm not practicing what I preach by not carefully mixing color and value and get it right the first time, but there's a good reason for it. You see, this painting isn't alla prima. I can't hope to do it alla prima - it's way too complicated. I have to rely on processes of slowly building a painting, rather than go at it all at once.

I will come back to every part of the painting two, three times or more and repaint to get the quality I want.

This sorta gives you a before and after of working out the circle window thingy. (If anyone knows the proper term for that stuff, please tell me)

In actuality, there is a fence and a hedge in front of the structure. And some trees, too. But I doubt that it was always like that. In the past, the grounds must have gone through some changes, and maybe there was nothing around the perimeter. I don't really worry that my painting doesn't portray the grounds literally. I think it works better with a simpler design here. I'll put a few figures in later, but no trees and no hedge. I think the literal depiction would take away from the overall effect.

...or I may change my mind later. Who knows. This is only the third day into the painting. Tomorrow, I will start by tackling the ornamentation in the middle area, and hopefully start the fun part of pushing thick paint around.