Monday, October 18, 2010

Venice Sunset Gondola Ride Prototype


This is a quick prototype painting for a larger work I'm working on. It's oil on 6x8" canvas panel. This quick limited color work is a nice contrast the previous work I did with lots of bright colors.

The picture was originally taken by my grandmother when she visited Venice over a decade ago. The lighting and contrast are very interesting in this picture. When I saw it, it reminded me of some of Whistler's Nocturne paintings: limited palette and atmospheric.

So I did a little bit of research on the internet on Whistler's painting method, especially for his Nocturnes. He seemed to have use dark ground, and then he mixed oil paint with say turpentine and painted it like water color, and allowing the dark ground to show through. He took great care of the values in his paintings. I did this quick prototype with this method, using a mixture of black and red oxide acrylic as ground, and thinned oil with just cadmium orange, prussian blue, black, and white. Now I can visualize the picture on a smaller canvas, it helps me to work on a larger canvas.

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