Notre Dame WIP - Day 4

I hope I'm not boring you with this incremental progress report! Now that all the big stuff is drawn in, the progress from here on won't be so dramatic. It may even be difficult to tell what I did from shot to shot, so I'll be sharing more detail shots from this point.

I started this morning by straightening out some of my vertical lines which were, despite my best efforts, out of whack. Even though I use a perfectly accurate grid to begin with, inevitably my verticals starts leaning over. I couldn't see it when I was facing the canvas, but it's clear as bell on the small photo onscreen. I should have expected it because this ALWAYS happens.

Anyway, fixing it is just a matter of straightening the lines out, so it's not a big deal at this stage because I haven't finalized anything yet. Everything is painted thinly, so it's fairly easy.

You can see my pencil lines in this shot. The surface is not dry, so laying the T-square right on top of it does mess up what I already painted, but as I mentioned above, I haven't committed to anything so it's OK.

No frills or tricks. It is what it is. My brushwork is pretty raw.

I've had to move quite a few verticals. Took me all morning, but I think I've got it now.

I had to redraw this part because moving the verticals changed everything. That's one of the drawbacks of working without a tight initial drawing. On the other hand, I do end up with a much free-er look, if I manage to have some faith in my brush.

Here is a sequence in which I work out the ornamental railing. Jeremy, this kind of relates to what you were asking, although these aren't circles, I approach these the same way.
Here I've just painted the top and the bottom of the railing, with nothing in between.

I've sectioned off the space that the clover things are going to occupy. On either side of the triangle, there will be two full clovers flanked by half clovers. The sections I drew are where the clovers touch one another.

Like so. I'm just using a cool grey color, and a small brush. Oh and I'm mixing liquin into my colors. To all colors, actually, not just this specific area.

Then, using a dark color, I work the negative space to eliminate unwanted marks, and shape the clovers. I keep saying "clovers" because I don't know what they're called. But you know what I mean, right? Good.

Then on top of what I just painted, I paint the sunlit areas with a lighter, warmer color. And that's all there is to it. Fairly straightforward, no?

This is what it looks like now, at the end of Day 4. Toward the top of the painting, I've started laying on some thicker paint. More often than not, I scrape it off and repeat because I don't like the color I put down, or simply to get an edge on a shape.

The roof. Some of the lines are done with a knife's edge, the others are done with a brush. This is still not the final layer.

The reflected light on the buttress to the left was violet before, but as I warmed up the sunlight, the violet became a little too cute so I had to tame it down. Besides, even with brilliant blue skies affecting the shadow side, light bouncing off of a nearby object (in this case, the warm yellow light on the wall) can easily dominate the apparent hue of a shadow. Notice the shadow underneath the arch is much darker and isn't affected (much) by neither the blue sky nor the yellow sunlight.

The sunlit buttress. I had a bit of a difficulty deciding just what sort of pale yellow I wanted, so I scraped and repainted a few times. Still not happy with it.

The roof is gray. The cast shadows on the roof becomes very blue because it faces the sky. Because the roof doesn't have a strong local color, the blue light from the sky makes these cast shadows dramatically blue. If the sky were overcast, or the roof itself had a strong color, or if the surface did not face the sky, we would have very different colored shadows.

I'll keep some of the scrape marks, and paint over others. I like to see evidence of the process in paintings like these. It's like a visual record of a struggle. Like footsteps of a journey. Of course, whatever marks I leave visible on the canvas has to work for the painting as a whole. Otherwise, it just looks like a cheap gimmick. We don't want that.

Tomorrow I continue with thicker paint (and scraping and painting and scraping and painting) and hopefully resolve all the shadow colors and values. If I can remember, I'll do another mini-sequence of something.