Centennial Hall, before and after
Posted: October 30, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized 17 CommentsI’m not quite sure why I never finished my sketch of Centennial Hall this summer but I found it in a box recently and thought it might be worth hauling it out and adding some darks.
The only problem with working on a painting some months later is that you forget what your colour palette was. I can safely say that I used a limited palette when I started this sketch but I threw caution to the wind today and used whatever dried leftovers I had on my palette from this week.
Whatever you did…it worked!
Just those few darks, really. Thanks Linda!
Sometimes leftovers can taste pretty darn good!
You are so right James. I often don’t like my work when I bring it home. I guess I should sometimes throw it in the box instead of tearing it up.
Our daughters had a graduation there..soo many years ago from Ecole Primaire Beaconsfield..
Love it!
That’s funny Monique. My kids went to the same school for several years!
We are often so self critical and I find it a good idea to set work out of view and reassess later with fresh eyes. Your addition of the darks and those wonderful splashes of paint in the foreground really complete this piece. Also your color is always so clean. Very enjoyable.
Jody
Thanks Jody. I just had a look at your website and saw that you use value sketches the same way I do. You have a really nice tutorial on there about them too. Thanks for sharing your work. It was a pleasure to see your beautiful paintings.
I really like both of these sketches… if the first one is an example of what you discard in boxes, then I think you need to have a recalibration of your art appreciation meter.
I like the greens that you have used… they are very close to the Australian greens that I can see out of my window right now. And I like the composition with the subject filtered through the trees and the eye being led into the scene through the gap. I also like the elevated building with the roof cropped off… did you mean to do that or was that a mistake?
Thanks Ross. Those Australian greens must be very beautiful at this time of year.
Where is the roof cropped off? At the top of the painting?
This is Australia… the grass looks like that all through the year… except after a bush fire, then it looks black.
And, where would you normally expect the roof to be cropped off… yes Shari, at the top of the painting. Or is there some other cropped roof in the painting that I am failing to see? : )
So about the roof, I did not intentionally crop it off. As with most things I draw, I just start somewhere (maybe I started by drawing the columns and the front of the building) and keep on drawing until at some point I hit the edge of the paper. In this case the roof hit the edge of the paper.
LOL. You could build a whole Summer workshop around that approach. “Hitting the edge of the paper” by Shari Blaukopf… new approaches to highly considered compositional techniques. What do you think?
I think that’s a great idea for a book. What do you think about that. The title is done and now I just have to write the rest of it.
A book sounds good!
So… I’ve done the title and the summary-phrase, you do the content and I’ll fix up your punctuation. Does that sound like a good division of labour? I also know where to find a graphic artist at good rates. We can talk about the split of profits later. : )
Those added darks make the sketch jump!
That’s what the darks do most of the time. It’s like CMYK printing that I am teaching at school. A photo looks bleh in CMY and when you add the K it pops.