Urban

"No. 1059" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on Multimedia Artboard, 6 x 8". Copyright ©2010, all rights reserved.

Trolley No. 1059 was built in 1948 and acquired by San Francisco in 1992 to become part of their historic streetcar collection. Though it served in Philadelphia, the car is painted to represent the Boston Elevated Railway Co..

Our location is on the Embarcadero at a stop near the Ferry Building, with the Bay Bridge in the background:
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Pretty, eh?

This week my goal was to not murder the paint by working it to death, so I limited myself to only one hour. Got finished in only 50 minutes. Yay! I’d love to have a bigger version of this one for my wall, so I might try it again when I have a big birch panel on hand.

Many thanks to Lee Brown for providing yet another spectacular HDR photo for his A Day Not Wasted June challenge. His process removes most of the “bad” stuff artists encounter when painting from photographic references, like dead shadows and blown out highlights. His photos are so lifelike it’s almost like painting on location.

"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:

"The View" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on 6 x 6" Gessobord panel. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

My answer to Karin Jurick‘s Different Strokes City Rooftops challenge. Thank you, Karin, for another versatile reference photo. The shot was taken from her hotel room in San Francisco, which reminded of Gerry Beckley’s (America) “View From The Hotel” series of photographs. He shoots the view from every hotel on tour, even if it’s just a parking lot, then catalogs everything by date on his website. Very cool. These kind of shots remind me that it’s the more mundane views from our travels that are often the most interesting in retrospect.

This was a fun painting to tackle. Here are a few shots taken along the way:

First I laid down an undercoat of acrylic in greyed purple-ish tones found in one of the buildings in the background.  (It’s also the color of my bedroom.) Most of the foreground buildings will be yellow, so setting up a complementary color scheme early will hopefully keep the colors harmonious.

A loose drawing in grey marker went over the top of the acrylic.  Even though this won’t be an abstract, I’m looking for shapes that would be pleasing and balanced if abstracted.

These next few shots were taken in the studio at night with little color correction, so they look warmer than they actually are.

Next I start to apply the oil paint with a 1″ slant brush. Usually I try not to premix my paints much, but on this one I am because the colors are so delicate, and the values are so important. I’m even using a value card to get those values right.

Here’s a color I love: Naples yellow! Mixed with titanium white, it’s like creamy sunshine. It makes me happy just looking at it. I don’t use yellow ochre. Though many artists use it successfully, it’s dull and heavy in my hands.

Finally, I get to paint the metal thingies on the roof! I love painting metal. I’ve taken some artistic license and made them shinier than galvanized steel, more like stainless, just ’cause I love painting shiny things

Oopsy, some of those horizontal lines aren’t very horizontal – gotta fix that!

The final piece, shot outdoors and color balanced so it’s as accurate as possible. (Though I was kinda loving the red tones.)

I don’t know what time of day Karin took her photo, but I’ve been trying to portray the pale lemony light of early morning in San Francisco, with a bit of fog hovering in the distance.

If I’d been doing this image purely as a cityscape, I think I would have left off some of the fussier details, like the metal bands (probably an earthquake retrofit) on the building on the right. But in an abstract state of mind, I sought out and emphasized repeating shapes and rhythms, and those bands gave me an opportunity for a nice vertical rhythm. I tried to hit every number between one and six when I chose how many items to put in each group of images. Maybe it’s just me, but I believe this creates a rhythm which is pleasing in a Sesame Street kind of way.

"Telegraph Hill" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on paper. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

This was one of those crazy weeks when I thought I’d never get anything done for the current Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge hosted by Karin Jurick. My first mistake was forgetting to seal the paper before I started painting in oils. The paper sucked all the oils out of the paint and it felt like Play-Doh under my brush. I should’ve just started over, but I kept torturing myself with it. Here’s where it was when I abandoned it:

"Up Telegraph Hill" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on paper. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

It didn’t totally suck – the light was okay in parts of it – but I didn’t like how tentative it looked. It was obvious I was unsure of myself and was adding detail just because I didn’t know what else to do.

I needed to loosen up, and it was too early in the day for wine, so I turned on some music, got out my acrylics, out and did a quickie:

Not pretty, but it got me out of that paint-every-detail mindset so I could move on. I started wondering how much detail I could omit and still have it read as a street on a hill. Using the same colors I used in the first painting, I painted this:

I almost left it like that, but I thought it needed a couple more identifying elements:

Hopefully now it looks more like city streets than a canyon.

I tried a new technique to get the telephone pole straight: I dipped the edge a piece of cardboard in paint and stamped it on.

This is going to be one of those paintings people either like, or will say “WTF?”

Just in case any of you artists are still working on this challenge and need a street view of some of the finer details, here’s the location:
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This is actually a block closer than Karin’s view, at the 3-way intersection at the bottom of the hill. I know that view well – Karin was probably next to the San Francisco Art Institute when she took the reference photo. There’s a cable car line that goes from Taylor to Columbus in this intersection, so painting in a cable car wouldn’t be out of the question. (I thought about it…) Just around the corner on Columbus, you’ll see the world famous Bimbo’s 365 Club. Up at the top of Telegraph Hill a couple of blocks over is Coit Tower, which has some really cool murals in it.

"Madison Avenue" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on Gessobord panel, 6 x 6". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

Here’s another painting for Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks painting challenge.

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The reference photo. Photograph by Karin Jurick, copyright © 2009, all rights reserved.

Karen tells us that our location is the corner of Madison Avenue and 39th Street in New York City. This is useful information, because it allows me to look it up in Google Maps using Street View.

I can’t paint from a photo unless I can imagine myself inside the scene, and Google Street View helps me do that. I can see what’s behind me, up, down, on the next block, etc. I can even see that beyond that red awning there’s a McDonald’s in case I want some virtual high octane coffee while I paint. Photos are never as good as being there, but Street View is the next best thing. (BTW, if you haven’t seen it yet, check out Bill Guffey’s Virtual Paintout challenge. They paint – with Google’s blessings – from Google Street Views.)

By looking at the Google map, I can see that we’re facing north, and the time of day is probably – as I’d guessed – morning. That will help me make my color choices. Coincidentally, the Google Street View image looks like it was taken about the same time of day that Karin took her photo.

For comparison, I’ve also included Karin’s original reference photo. It’s the same scene, the same size, yet see how different these two images are? Photos DO lie! Always. Neither of these photos is completely accurate. The Google image was taken with a series of wide angle lenses, creating all sorts of distortion and making distances appear much longer than they really are. My guess is that Karin’s was taken with a bit of a telephoto, compressing distances unnaturally. The truth can be found somewhere between these two images.

If I had time, I could try to correct the distortion by drawing the buildings using perspective. But I’m in a rush, and more attracted to the cars than the skyline (I like colorful shiny things!), so I’ll focus just on the lower right corner of the reference for my painting.

Here are a few photos I took along the way:

Hmmm… what color to tone the background? Well, the tail lights are my favorite part of this photo, so let’s try “tail light color.”

The background toning is acrylic. From here on out, I’ll be using oils.  I didn’t want to get too fussy, so I’m drawing directly on the panel with a brush and Mars Black oil color.

(Note: The next few in-progress images are were taken in the studio with a camera at night, and I didn’t take the time to color correct them well. Too much red, too little blue.)

The painting progresses, and I can’t make up my mind about the figure on the street corner…

A woman striking a “casual” pose?

A businessman on his way to work?

An indistinct cluster of people?

Yeah, I think I’ll go with that last one.

This final image was done on the scanner and color-corrected so it’s truer to the original painting.

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Oil painting on gessoed Arches paper, 6 x 6″
Copyright Lesley Spanos 2008, all rights reserved.

I don’t think she’s really from Tennessee. I just like the name. This is another one from Karin Jurick‘s “Different Strokes From Different Folks” weekly challenge. We were given a really cool reference photo to work from – very Hopper-ish -  but it was upside down! Karin asked us to do at least 95% of the work with the photo and painting inverted.

Working upside down isn’t unusual for me. I work flat and rest my hand on the canvas while I paint, so spinning it in any direction to find a dry spot is second nature. The real challenge here was painting heels. I struggled with those shoes upside down and right-side up. In fact my entire 5% of right-side up time was wasted on those darn shoes. I really seem to have a mental block against them. Maybe it’s my hatred of wearing heels manifesting itself through my art.

Just for kicks, the second photo shows this painting in the early stages. Often I paint on a red ground, but a dark black/blue/red color seemed the way to go with this one. I was able to leave much of it exposed in the window and coat. This in-progress shot also shows my lack of pre-painting preparation. I don’t like to draw much in advance. I think of painting more like sculpture – I’m coaxing the form out of nothing.

After I finished the painting, I looked at the reference image on the computer and noticed there were some interesting reflections in the window that didn’t show in my printout. A man and a car. Darn! I hope someone else does something with them.

Here’s how it looked as I worked on it upside down.

Do you like Edward Hopper as much as I do? Writer Kevin Grandfield has created a really cool blog about his work: Hunting Nighthawks: On the Road with Edward Hopper.