June 20th, Fourth Painting Session

Dawn and I met today at 9:00 to paint. Christine was out of town so it's just the two of us today.
Setting up of the panels, equipment, supplies, references, paints and palettes, etc. takes about 45 minutes, and clean-up takes almost as long. Because of how long it takes to set up and clean up we decided early on to make our painting sessions lengthy. Today we worked all day with just a short lunch break (we mostly bring our lunches) to make good use of our time.

Today I planned to work on refining the Downtown VB panel, correcting perspective and positioning of all the elements, as best I could considering the abbreviation and foreshortening of the architectural scene.
Pictured is a handy method of creating vanishing points with string (per Christine's suggestion). Using the rough painted angles which I created using the gridding technique, I stretched string over the highest and lowest vanishing point angles and secured each end with brown tape. At the point where both strings crossed over each other was the "vanishing point." At each prominent architectural element I stretched another string in place, intersecting at the vanishing point that was created with the first two strings.

With the strings in place, I redrew the angles and architectural elements in a darker shade of brown paint, and roughly whited out the old lines. I repeated this for the other side of the vanishing point, stretching more strings on another panel on the opposite side of the Downtown panel.

As you can see, the perspective elements of the corner building, Vero Furniture, is much more accurate. This process, albeit interesting to do, was extremely time-consuming but will pay off in the end with a finer product. I was surprised at how long it took, which meant I didn't get much done this day. We had a couple of visitors today, people who saw the news of it in the newspaper.
Dawn is pictured here working on her Swamp panel. First she rough sketched a few elements of her scene with vine charcoal, and at this point she is putting down a loose wash of color over the scene.

Dawn had spent a good part of the day refining clouds and assuring the continuity from one panel to another. We also discussed the coordination of my elments segueing onto her panel, which should prove to be a bit challenging but we'll work it out.

There may be a painting session tomorrow (Tuesday) with Chris and Dawn, but I will not be there. We were packed up and gone by 3:30.

So that's it folks, more postings Friday, so stay tuned!