"Stanley Steamer" sketch by Lesley Spanos. Gouache and pen on kraft paper, 8" x 9". Copyright ©2011 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

I’d never seen a steam-powered car fired up until I saw this one. It was in the daily parade at the Indiana State Fair, it’s shiny red paint gleaming in the sun. When I looked up Stanley Steamer Motor Carriage Company on Wikipedia, I found a photo of this car in the article. Not just this model, but this actual car with the same US flag decal on the windshield, and the same owner/driver, photographed at the Indiana State Fair. Small world, eh?

I’m posting this one in Liz Wilzen’s Value Challenge on Daily Paintworks. Liz’s challenge requires us to use only four values, so I used black marker, white gouache, and a brown gouache. The light brown paper works as the fourth value. I used to like doing sketches like this in life drawing class in school, but that was a LONG time ago!

"Blue Angels" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic painting on birch plywood panel, 5.5 x 13". Copyright ©2011 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

I swear that if 100 photographers at 100 different air shows pointed their lenses at the US Navy’s Blue Angels demonstration team, 50 of them would come up with a shot similar to mine, and some would be so much alike you’d have to overlay them to tell the difference. This seems to be the iconic view of the Blue Angels in diamond formation, and the similarity between photos is a tribute to the precision of this team.  As a photographer, I am happy when I can stop the action and see details I missed as these jets flew over at hundreds of miles per hour. It pleases me to no end to clearly see the helmets of the pilots in the cockpits.

But that’s photography. When I put on my painter’s apron, I need to interpret images differently. To quote Maverick, “I feel the need… the need for speed!” My photo is static. Those planes could be models hanging from a child’s bedroom ceiling. What I need to paint is what I experienced that day. I want to look at that painting and hear those jets going over me. So I pushed beyond the photo, asking myself what cues indicate movement. I blurred vertical lines a bit. I chose a wide format and jammed the noses of the aircraft right up to the left edge of the painting, like they were flying by so fast they almost flew out of the frame. The sky was painted in bold horizontal strokes. I was relieved when my contrails turned out better than I anticipated, because there had to be something of interest in all that empty space.

As a side note, I knew I’d be painting the Blue Angels this week. Just thought I’d be using fresh photos for reference. The team was due to perform at the Mount Comfort air show this past weekend, but they were rained out. I’ve been considering doing an air show series, and hated missing an opportunity to photograph them again.  But I took solace in the fact that they flew right over my house on Thursday, twice! In a way, it’s more cool to have them visit me on my turf than it is to see them on theirs.

"Blue Angels, 2009 Mt. Comfort Air Show" photograph by Lesley Spanos

"Clutches" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on Gessobord, 5" x 7". Copyright ©2011 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

There’s a little game I like to play to challenge myself when painting people. As I work on the initial composition, I ask myself “How much information can I eliminate, and still tell this person’s story?” This forces me to narrow my focus, and hone in on what drew me to the scene in the first place.

In this case, I liked how the woman held her clutch purse while perching delicately behind her wheat-bellied partner.  Showing their faces would not have enhanced that story, so… off with their heads! That’s how we see things, anyway – in bits and pieces, not everything all at once.

This painting is from my State Fair USA series. I photographed this couple as they arrived at the fair. After some research, I think this might be a Yamaha Royal Star Venture from the early 2000s. Any experts out there who can verify this?

"1938 Chevy Sedan" by Lesley Spanos. Spotted at the 2009 Mount Comfort Air Show. Acrylic painting on Ampersand Gessobord, 5 x 7". Copyright ©2011 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved. $125

Saw this two-toned 1938 Chevy sedan at a car show, and knew I’d paint it someday. Tom and Marla, I love your car!

"Morning Tram" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic painting on Multimedia Artboard, 5 x 7". Copyright ©2010 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

Another in my State Fair Series. It was the bit of sunlight on her shoe and leg that made me want to paint this image.

"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.

"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.

"Travelin' Shoes" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on 10 x 5.5" paper. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

This Different Strokes airport travelers challenge reminded me of Elvin Biship’s song, “Travelin’ Shoes,” which I put on repeat as I painted. These days the lyric should be, “gotta put on my (easy on easy off no metal shank) travelin’ shoes.” Nothing like some good foot stomping butt swinging music to make the hours fly by in the studio.

I loved the drama of Karin’s high contrast airport photo, but for my purposes it was a bit too dark. I couldn’t see the feet in the shadows, and I was having a hard time imagining what they might look like from that perspective. Also couldn’t see the colors in the darker cast shadows.  So I lightened the reference photo in Photoshop.

Here’s a quick explanation of the hows and whys of lightening shadows:

It’s difficult to capture the full range of light and dark in a single photo. If you expose the light parts correctly, the shadows might get get too dark. Expose the shadows so they glow, and the highlights burn out. As an example, I took four photos of plants on my kitchen windowsill.

In the first, the meter reading came from the impatiens on the right. They look okay, but everything else is too light. The coleus leaves on the left are disappearing in a white glare.

The second photo was exposed so the coleus on the left would look good. But now everything else is too dark! We can barely see the impatiens in the shadows.

The third photo uses the camera’s automatic settings, averaging the lights and darks  to arrive at something in-between. I’d love to be Goldilocks and be able to say this one is “just right,” but it’s not. The lights are too light, and the darks are too dark. These are some of the same auto-exposure issues I saw in the airport photo.

The fourth was taken with a flash. The colors are much closer to what I was seeing in real life, but the shadows are off because the main light source is from the front. I won’t paint from flash photos anymore, because it’s almost impossible to make the painting look like anything but a copy of a flash photo. Not good, when my goal is to make everything I paint look like it was painted from life.

Ideally, when taking reference photos I bracket the exposures, so I have good shots of both the light and dark areas. If I use a tripod, I can take it a step further and use HDR software to combine multiple images into one. Often that’s not possible, so what do we do when we have only one dark photo to work from? Here’s my quick Photoshop solution:

These are both photo #2, but in the second version I’ve lightened the shadows in Photoshop. This can be done using levels, or with the “lighten shadows” slider. It’s a quick, easy fix that selectively brings light back into the shadows without destroying detail in the lighter areas. This image is the closest to what I saw in real life. Gosh, I really need to scrub down that kitchen wall.

Here’s the same effect used on Karin’s photo:

Lightening the reference made the feet and shadow colors more visible, though I must admit I still had to fake the shape of the feet (and they still don’t look right).

Now, on to the painting. These are a few images I took along the way:

The acrylic underpainting loosely suggests where the light and shadow areas will be.

The sketch began with pastel pencil, so I could easily wipe off my mistakes and start over. I knew I’d be making a LOT of mistakes on this one.

Once the drawing was as good as I could get it, I started reinforcing some of my pastel lines with acrylic paint so I wouldn’t accidentally wipe off all my hard work.

More detail in acrylic. I was going to switch to oils before now because I thought it would be impossible to create a soft transition from light to shadow with acrylics.  Not so – my test transition was nicely fuzzy – so I kept going with the acrylics.

I paid special attention to the lower left corner, where several floor sections intersect in the middle of a shadow. Getting the values and colors right in that area were the key to creating the illusion of a shadowed terrazzo floor.

I gave the floor depth by making the speckles in the foreground bigger and brighter, fading them out as they receded into the background. Also it gets bluer as it recedes, just like a landscape.

One of the last details was to give the woman Captain’s stripes on her sleeve. I liked the idea of black heels and power.

Here’s a little Elvin Bishop, if you care to listen to my painting soundtrack:

"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.

"Just Plane Sketching" by Lesley Spanos. Gouache on paper, 5 x 4". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

Nothing special here, just a little gouache sketch from recent travels to prove that I’m still alive.  This was what I saw outside the window as I ate lunch in a small airport. The plane was gleaming in the early afternoon sun, and the palm fronds were swaying in a hot breeze. It was all very exotic. I didn’t even begin to do the scene justice, but by painting it, I’ve fixed it in my memory forever.

"Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail" motorcycle painting by Lesley Spanos. Oil on archival 9 x 12" Raymar canvas panel. ©Copyright 2009, all rights reserved.

Fortunately I had my camera with me the day I saw this Harley in a parking lot at the Indiana State Fair.  I’m not a motorcycle person, but this thing was a work of art. It was gorgeous. The chrome was blindingly shiny, reflecting sky and clouds and earth. The painting is small, only 9 x 12″, but I’m imagining how cool it would look painted life-size or a little bigger.

Painting chrome is new to me, so I fussed with it a lot and was never was completely satisfied. I’m starting to understand it better though. Next time I need to be bolder with the strokes, and think of them as abstract squiggles.

Here are some shots I took along the way:

The canvas was toned with a sloppy mix of acrylics using a big brush. I suppose I should make a better drawing right from the start, but usually I just begin painting with minimal pencil guidelines and refine as I go with paint. But really… that wheel is pathetic, and if I’d started with a good wheel, I could have saved an hour of “refining.”

There’s one part of this painting I love – the background! I made a few pastel color mixtures, thinning the paint a lot, then slopped it on casually. It’s loose and colorful, but not so much that it detracts from the bike.

Finally the big shapes were in place and the wheel was looking less wonky, so I was able to start adding details.

The final step was all about making the chrome “pop” by adding the final darkest darks and lightest lights.

I could probably keep torturing this one for hours, but I think I’ll call it done and get back to painting some desserts. Probably something chocolate. I have a new tube of a color called Terra Rosa sitting here, and it almost looks like chocolate right out of the tube. Can’t wait to try it!