Wait! I'm Not Done!

Are you getting as burnt out on seeing this painting as I am? It's been pretty intense for me working on this day after day, and going much faster than I normally would. If I let my guard down, the strokes get sloppy and I have to spend more time fixing them. I can only go eight or nine hours a day at most at this pace. Not like art school days~

But now we are finally getting down to the fun part, where I can play with some thicker strokes and orchestrate the entire painting, rather than tediously drawing and redrawing the architecture. I go back and forth between light and shadow, trying to get an interesting interaction between two adjoining shapes. Each and every edge is revisited and scrutinized, and I look for opportunities to break rules without sacrificing believability.

And I'm getting more into the details too. Here I'm adding back the figures at the bottom. They'll be in lurking in the shadows so they're just bit players, but they help to give us a sense of the sheer scale of this thing. The figures also give this painting a little bit of a traditional feel. A lot of the paint treatment I have in this painting is more modern but it's not quite rock 'n roll.

First, I draw in the rough silhouettes with a dark color. I'm not looking for specific poses, but I do want to make sure they don't have gestures which might suggest a specific narrative. I want them to be just "there", and look like they belong there, but not demand any attention.

Added some color on top. Simple shapes defining parts with different colors/values.

Didn't like it. Scrape. You can see I did some shaping from the outside, too.

Felt I had offered too much information. Simplify, simplify. Considering the roles that these figures play in my painting, does adding different colors to their clothing enhance the overall visual experience? Are they even necessary? I think, in this case, the simpler the better.

And let them be in the painting. Not merely on canvas. How to do that? integrate the edges.

Here's a close up of one of the towers. What I want to show you is that although many parts of this view are in the sunlight, they're not all the same value. In the tower itself, the value becomes lighter as we go up higher. and saturation happens at a lower value.

The two flying buttresses in the shadow are of different values also. The closer one is darker. The farther one is lighter due to atmospheric perspective, but also affected by the color of the roof. Now here's an advanced concept; Notice the shadow side of the far buttress is facing toward us and is not receiving any reflected light from the roof. But I let it be affected by the roof color (a lot, in fact. Almost the same color!) because the shapes are adjacent to one another. It's not based on "rules of realism" but it works toward creating unity and a more believable atmospheric effect.

And this is what it looks like now. What's next? More orchestration.