Progress on my Warming Hut painting

It's been a little while since I last posted about progress on my latest oil painting. As I mentioned before, my painting instructor is teaching in Florence, Italy(!) for a month, so I'm trying to see how I do painting on my own. It's been a bit of a challenge, as I'm still finishing a bit of work with clients before the end of the month, but I have found a couple of days to make some progress on this latest painting.

Here's where the painting was at the end of May:


May 29th

My instructor, Dean, was able to pop by to see it before he left for Florence. He was able to give me some very helpful feedback.

You'll notice that the top of the grass hill is hitting exactly in the center of the height of the painting. From a composition point-of-view, that's not ideal. It draws your eye there because it is centered. He suggested that I lower the hill to create a more harmonious composition. He also suggested that I try to get another photo from the same spot, but from up on the hill so I can have a photo of the buildings behind the grass hill. I was able to take this photo in early June.


photo from June 1st

Now that I had this photo, I was able to put some buildings behind the grass hill. This adds more interest to the painting, and also helps with the composition.

Dean had also given me some pointers on the perspective of the main building and its roof. I adjusted the angles of the roof, both the top and bottom. I also shortened the width of the building (the front) a bit.


June 13th

Yesterday, I worked on it a bit more. I focused first on the sky. Dean had shown me some suggestions of clouds from other photos that I might consider using. I'm still thinking about it, but I wanted to see how the painting would look with the sky as I saw it from the photo. It was a good exercise: I had to study the colors, and mix various shades of purples, blues and greens. I used the light blue base that I had started with a couple of weeks ago to be used instead of a stark white. I'm pretty pleased with it. I'll have to see what Dean says.

I also worked a bit on the Golden Gate Bridge. I knew had wanted to work on the sky first, since the bridge is sitting on top of it. :) I'm having some minor perspective issues with the bridge, but nothing too bad for the stage that it's in. I also reworked the buildings in the background just a bit. For the most part, they are better, but one got erased, and put back in, so that needs to be reworked a bit.

I also did a tiny bit of the bay water (since I had all those nice blues, greens and purples from the sky!) and played with the right side of the grass just a bit.

I think it's getting better.



My next step is to email the last photo to Dean - he has offered to give me feedback while I'm working on my painting, even though he's teaching in Italy! I'll send him a photo this afternoon to see what his thoughts are. Should be interesting to see how that works! Gotta love technology!

When my Gay Boyfriend got home last night, I was just wrapping up painting for the day. He said, "I've never seen "Painter Trina" before! I had a fist-full of paint brushes in one hand and told him that apparently, Painting Trina can hold six brushes in one hand at a time! :) Random, but kind of a fun photo.