Notre Dame WIP - Day 5

Moving Forward! I didn't get a chance to post last night because I had too much wine. I mean I was exhausted from working on this painting.

It's getting much harder to tell from the photos the incremental changes I've made. Even I can't tell what I did in some of these shots, so I have to edit down to fewer photos to show.

The first thing I did here, is to knock back the values in the lower part of the painting. One major concern of pulling off a complex architectural painting like this is that, whereas all the intricate shapes create fascinating patterns of light and shadow, it also causes the composition to become all broken up into little fragments, lacking unity. Also, because there's interesting mini-compositions everywhere, it's easy to get seduced into emphasizing every little beautiful thing in this magnificent architecture. As with anything, the consequence of emphasize everything, is that nothing stands out.

What we need is a hierarchy of importance. And rather than going about it by popping certain areas, I like to quiet down the supporting areas instead. So I did a bit of quick glazing the bottom parts of the cathedral with a mix of liquin, black, and brown. Just transparently brushing it over the already-dry areas to knock some lights back into the shadow.

I'm only working the middle to lower half of the painting because the top half is still wet and I can't glaze over wet paint.

You can see the glazing brushstrokes here. There's all kinds of ways to apply glazing. Some times it's it's done with smooth or invisible brushstrokes, other times the entire painting is completely covered with generous amounts of the glaze and wiped off with a rag. I am merely brushing it on thinly with a big soft brush. Most of the glazed areas will be repainted with opaque pigments anyway, so I don't really care about smooth glazes.

Glazing in the shadows of the middle area. My brush touched some of the wet paint and it got a little mushy. This is what happens when I have to do a big painting in ten days - I normally like to take a few months to do something like this, working on a little bit at a time and setting it aside for days or weeks while I do something else. But this time, I've got a show to do!

Working back into the glazed areas with opaque pigments. Essentially repainting with the newly re-defined values. Where I went too dark, I am now pulling back out again with lighter values.

...such as the sunlight hitting the glass windows. I need to make a decision whether to show the windows with the sun light defining the intricate detail, or push it back into the shadow for mood and simplicity. The only way to really see which I like better, I have to try both.

Here I've continued the weak sunlight down to the short wall at the bottom and the ground plane. I'm leaning toward pushing the windows into shadow, so I will go back to glazing them back into darkness once the surface is dry. At the same time, I'll glaze down the wall and the ground plane, so with that in mind, I painted them a little lighter than what I'll end up with.

The little dot is my vanishing point. See all the lines on the ground plane converge to that single point? If you were to pull a vertical line up from this point, you will notice that many of the major convergence points (not necessarily vanishing points) will fall on it. Like the upper flying buttresses, the seams on the roof all converge to points on that same line.

Checking to see how it looks in the frame. I often like to do this long before it's finished. The clean, finished trim provided by the frame helps to see whether I need to go tighter with the painting, or whether the looseness – which sometimes look too loose and unfinished without the frame – looks intentional and appropriate.

Next step; more glazing if the paint is dry. Something else if not.