Posts made in April, 2010

"Gran Canaria Highway" by Lesley Spanos. M. Graham gouache on Multimedia Artboard, 9.5 x 5". Painted with permission from Google Street View image. Painting copyright ©2010, all rights reserved.

This one almost ended up in the dumpster. It’s another piece I started for Bill Guffey’s Virtual Paintout, but things didn’t go the way I planned.

This time we’re on the island of Gran Canaria, one of Spain’s Canary Islands:

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Such a beautiful place! I want to be on that road driving a convertible with the wind whipping my hair.

Here are a few shots taken along the way:

I like the look of taped edges on a gouache, so I began by masking off the margins with clear packing tape. The tape needs to be burnished thoroughly so the pigment won’t bleed through.

Since I can’t draw a straight line, much less paint one (see last painting), I’ve indicated the water line in pencil.

Color is blocked in quickly.

Starting to refine and add some detail.

This was the finished piece when I packed up my paints for the day. It wasn’t working for me, and I was ready to toss it in the trash and chalk it up to experience.

This morning when I came into the studio, that big empty space in the middle was staring at me, and I realized what it needed – a car! Duh! Just because it’s not in the shot doesn’t mean I can’t pull one up from another Street View, right? So I traveled a little further up the virtual highway and found this one:
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I have a hard time drawing cars and it looks a bit wonky, but it improves the composition enough so I don’t hate the painting so much anymore. A few more adjustments, like greying the highway, and it’s done. Yay!

"Tenerife Overlook" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on Multimedia Artboard, 14 x 11". Painted with permission from Google Street View image. Painting copyright ©2010, all rights reserved.

Every month I tell myself I should participate in Bill Guffey’s Virtual Paintout, but I never get past the planning stage. Google’s Street View is too addicting. I get caught up in wandering the virtual streets looking for the perfect painting location, always sure there’s a slightly better angle or view just around the corner. I keep going like a cartoon donkey following a carrot on a stick and never choose a spot. For the current Canary Islands challenge I decided to bypass information overload and just pick a spot and paint. Since I love the ocean – and frankly, didn’t want to struggle with buildings and perspective – I restricted my search to a random five mile stretch on the southern coast of the island of Tenrife.

Here’s my chosen location:
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Google uses a pod-like cluster of cameras on top of a mast on the roof of the car, so the view is much higher than normal eye level for anyone but an oversized NBA athlete. In addition, the images are taken through wide angle lenses and stitched together, so the photos are distorted in odd ways, and sometimes bits are missing. When drawing from Google Stree View, we can either make the most of the quirky distorted look, or try to get rid of it.

I don’t like my paintings to look like they were copied from photos, so I try to get rid of the distortion. Easier said than done. I try to imagine I’m there and paint from the image in my mind, rather than copy the digital image in front of me. To help with that process, I put the photo behind me on the computer screen across the room, and glanced at it as little as possible. It worked for everything but the car.

Not much in-progress work to show this week. The acrylic paint was drying fast (the painting took less than two hours) and there was no time to shoot. I started with the standard red underpainting, which you can see in the car area. My favorite spot in the painting is the area in the water below the sun where the red shows through.

"Sedona Morning" by Lesley Spanos. 6 x 6" oil painting on Ampersand Gessobord. ©Copyright Lesley Spanos 2010, all rights reserved.

What’s that wretched creaking sound? Must be my rusty painting skills! It seems like all my creative focus lately has been on planning paintings, rather than actually painting. But then along comes a good art challenge, and like the challenge whore I am, I can’t help but play along. This one is hosted by Lee Brown on his A Day Not Wasted blog. An artist and photographer himself, Lee is providing some drool-worthy HDR photos that are an absolute pleasure to work from. No dead shadows in his work! Go see his Sedona Sunrise Challenge yourself for some great visual treats, and play along, if you’re so inclined.

This one didn’t exactly fall off the brushes, but at least I finished something. Here are a few photos taken along the way:

Starting with a loose brush sketch over a red ground. When I sketch with a brush, I use an angled flat, which makes good lines as well as filling in large areas quickly. With the paint, I tried to approximate the tone of the deepest shadows.

As the painting progresses, I try to let bits of the red show through. Easier said than done.

Here’s where I wish I’d stopped. I prefer the painting at this stage because it’s looser, warmer, and the values are closer together. But, as usual, I thought it needed to be more finished…

…so I tightened up the details and added more light and contrast. Now it looks more like 10am than sunrise.

I really loved how those twigs in the foreground caught the light in the reference photo, but I was having a devil of a time painting them with a brush, so I scratched them out with an exacto knife. I had to really dig in to get down to clean gesso. It was an okay experiment, but next time I’ll make the lines more “lost and found” rather than continuous, ’cause that’s how twigs catch the light.

Many thanks to Lee Brown for a fun challenge!