Walking to the Royal Alcázar
Painting at Walking to Alcazar
I am still working on compositions containing monumental buildings surrounded by rich vegetation because I am yet to settle on a technique to simplify complexity without the loss of information regarding the light and mood in the landscape.
Last week, I came accorss this photo reference of the Royal Alcázar in Segovia as seen from the parking lot down on the road leaving the city.
From that viewpoint, areas of lights and darks seem to be carved out of the horisontal plane by the cast shadows from the massive trees encasing the image to the left.
An imaginary diagonal from top left to the right side is interrupted by the image of the Alcázar towering into the blue sky.
A tiny entrance to an ascending pathway with stairs is visible at the lower end of the trees. It leads up to the western entrance to the castle on the hill. I can imagine a curved path and a couple walking towards the enterance to provide a scale reference to the composition.
I really like how the light casts a clean delimiting line between the foreground and midground on the horizontal plane.
In my prelimiary sketch, I imagined a couple looking towards the castle and placing the main tower at the upper right third of the composition.
My aim with this composition was to understand simplification without the loss of light. I wanted to maintain the play of lights and darks over the vertical vegetation without forcing the viewer to spent too much effort on it.
The highlight should be on the Alcazar itself. Its magnificent shape made it the candidate for many movies for a reason. It has sufficient elements (doors, windows, and connic roofs) to keep the eyes captured by its sight.