Distilled clock
During the plein air session at the Toronto Distillery last week, I found inspiration for a composition centred on the clock tower.
The beautiful blend of warm and cold colours reflected by various architectural elements of that site makes it specially appealing for a study.
For a value study, I chose to simplify the objects in the centre to just the few yellow umbrellas and the vegetation covering most of the remote building to the left.
I also did a small colour to experiment with saturated pigment for the large dark body representing the building on the right. Next is a painting on Arches cold press 11 x 9 inch study.
Initially, this study did not appear to be strident and was quite close in warmth to the reference photo, so I scaled up to paint the study on a quarter sheet with the same combination of pigments, including the permanent Rose from Daniel Smith.
It took me a lot of glazing to match the dark value of the building on the right with the red hue, because it is easy to manipulate the pigment out of the tube without mixing it with water on such a large surface. As a lesson learned this time is to not worry with the hue for objects that a very dark in the composition but not actually part of the composition.
A second weakness of this painting is the central section of the background, which is quite empty, thus leaving a clearly visible gap between the clock tower and the background building.
Yesterday, I chose to replant the composition with a small set of pigments (from Winsor & Newton), including only Ultramarine Blue, Burned Sienna, Burned Umber, and Raw Sienna. Same size of painting (quarter sheet paper) but keep the large building with neutrals (warm and cold) and focus only of its dark value.
With this new study, I put more work into filling the central background with shapes.
The clock tower appears better defined, as well as the three principal planes of the painting.