The Virtual Paintout

"Meander" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic painting on Ampersand Gessobord, 6 x 6". Copyright ©2010 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved. Painted with permission from Google Street View image.

This week Bill Guffey’s Virtual Paintout explores the islands of Hawaii. It was hard to narrow it down to one image out of the fourteen I chose, but eventually I settled on this beach scene in Hau’ula, Hawaii, on the northeast shore of Oahu:
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If I could go for a walk on a beach like that every morning, I could give up caffeine…

"Hey! Google!" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on Ampersand Gessobord, 6 x 6". Copyright ©2010 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved. Painted with permission from Google Street View image.

This month’s Virtual Paintout is in the Czech Republic. Finding a subject was difficult for me, until I came across this guy mugging for the Google Street Views camera. I liked him. Here he is on Street Views:
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I’ve seen collections of images of girls baring their chests for the Google cameras, but haven’t come across that yet while roaming the virtual streets.

Here are a few images taken along the way:

"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.