Back to work on the "Market Street" Painting

Remember the oil painting of Market Street I was working on? I hadn't done any work on it since the end of May.


Here's where we had left it.

I had decided to take a break from it as I worked on the Lavender Fields Commission Painting. Turns out, the Lavender Fields painting was a great thing to work on after the Market Street Painting. The Market Street painting has so many lines where the perspective has to be just right, whereas the Lavender Fields painting was much more organic in nature, and allowed a lot more freedom and flexibility.

Earlier this week, I decided it was time to go back and tackle that building on the left side. I knew that the angles of the windows weren't right, and they really needed to be corrected. I decided it was time to get technical, and broke out the ruler.

I opened up the original image in photoshop and made the file size the same dimensions as the canvas. I used the ruler on the photoshop file to read where each horizontal, and then vertical line lined up.


photoshop image with ruler guides

I then measured the canvas with a ruler and marked the beginning and end point for each line. I did that for all the horizontal lines first, then painted them in.


horizontal lines fixed

The building already looked MUCH better once I started to get the lines of the building corrected. Next, I did the large vertical beams.


Vertical beams are in

Finally, I added the lines for the individual window panes...


window panes

...and I darkened the windows in the top 2/3 of the building to help them read.


the building and windows look so much better!

By the way, I know the color is too light. I needed a color that would stand out from the darker colors that were already on the building. I'm waiting for the paint to dry, then I'll glaze over it with a darker color.

Yesterday, I tried to work on the "Bus Lane" lettering in the bus lane, but without much success. That's going to have to be painted over, and reworked. I had tried using the ruler and finding the vanishing point to get the right perspective, but I'm going to have to combine that with the measurement technique, I think.

I did darken the top of the sky, as well as the street. I also added the lamp post lights back in.


where I left off Thursday afternoon

There's still some significant work to do on this, but I feel like this painting is finally taking shape. After this, I may need to take a longer break from extreme perspective! :)