New Painting: Sunset over Mission Santa Clara

For those of you keeping track (because I can barely manage), I'm in San Francisco this week, before moving back up to Bellevue on Sunday on a more permanent basis. I had a few more things to take care of down here (including prepping Noe for her first flight!), including squeezing in one more in-person painting session today with Dean.

The painting that I started today is quite different (again) from any that I've previously done. The subject matter is very different. The original photo was taken by my Gay Boyfriend, who works at Santa Clara University. He took this photo of a gorgeous sunset over the Mission Santa Clara sometime last month. He posted it up on Facebook, and I thought it was a beautiful photo.


Original photo, taken by Spencer

The story may have ended there, but I had a painting session with Dean a few days after the photo was posted. Dean had also seen the photo on Facebook, had saved it on his computer, and had recommended that this might be something that I should consider painting. I thought it was a great suggestion.

One way in which this image is different for me is that it's a subject matter that I'm not necessarily connected to (although, my sister did get her undergraduate degree from Santa Clara University). It is a gorgeous image though, and I thought it would be a very good exercise for me to learn how to paint a sunset. I've done two paintings before with skies - Dolores Street and The Warming Hut. Obviously, the sky/sunset in this photo is very different from the two of those, and I thought it would be a great thing to learn to do under Dean's guidance.

The beginning of this painting couldn't have been any different from how I started my last painting, Taxi. With the Taxi painting, I was very careful with my initial sketching of the image on the canvas, and had to be so exact in the perspective. I probably spent a good hour sketching out the image, with ruler in hand.

On this painting, I spent maybe 10 minutes sketching out the image, but didn't have a whole lot of defined information to sketch in. This image is so much more organic, since more than half of the painting is the sunset/clouds. One thing that I did change in the composition was that I moved the Mission over to the right so that it wasn't perfectly centered, and less symmetrical.

Dean first had me color-match and mix about 5 different colors - the dark silhouette color (which I used black, alizarin crimson, and ultramarine blue), the dark pink, bright pink, bright purple, and light yellow in the sky.

I started with the abstract shapes in the sky/clouds, then made my way down to the silhouette of the Mission and trees. Once I started working on the silhouette, it surprised me how quickly this painting started to come together. There's a LOT more work to be done, for sure, but I'm pleased with the progressed that was made in this first session.


session one


session one with photo reference