Thursday, December 15, 2011

Château d’Azay-le-Rideau


This is for A Day Not Wasted, November 2011 challenge, Château d’Azay-le-Rideau, France. It's oil on 12x16 canvas panel.

This month's challenge is a beautiful Chateau in France. (ref) The reference photo looked beautiful, with wonderful sunlight and color. However, boy was this hard to paint. There were so many details with a Chateau like this. I don't like using rulers to draw lines when I sketch, so everything was done free hand. So my lines aren't exactly perpendicular or straight. But I figure I was more trying to capture the light and color rather than an architecturally correct picture.

The reflection was not easy since the first time I did it, it was too bright. I had to make the reflection greener and darker in value than the corresponding portion of the building above water.

Once I got the color mostly ok, I had to add in some details. I could have spent an arbitrary amount of time getting every detail down, but I have to stop here since I've got two more paintings to finish, lots of holiday cards to write, and to prepare to go off on a two week trip starting this weekend: pre-holiday crunch time!

2 comments:

  1. Hai Rebecca,

    I just saw your painting on A Day not Wasted. I think it's beuatiful, especially de bright blue color makes it a very nice painting! Like you, I don't like using rulers. If I would so, I would be a builder of houses and I'm not! :)

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