The last couple of weeks I've been very tired and also a bit burned out with plein air painting, I think, so I took a bit of a break. In the meantime I did paint a bit at home, and I did a couple of pencil sketches from life around town, which was already a refreshing break from plein air painting but evidently I needed another week or so. Then I felt ready to give it a shot again, so I headed to a spot I'd had my eye on for a while; a little seemingly out-of-use newsstand. As an added exercise after taking such a long break I tried to go for a more realistic color palette. Usually I prefer a muted palette, or sometimes brighter more saturated colors, usually to communicate luminosity. In this case the actual scene was a bit in between, sunlit but the subject isn't very colorful and it was slightly cloudy as well. I thought using more true-to-life colors would suit the subject better but it proved to be a bit of a challenge, and I'm not sure it was the best choice in the end. Especially determining the local colors on the newsstand was difficult. It is a dark muted red, which proved hard to make stand out from the surroundings in the painting. If I simply brightened the color it looked too cold and if I used a higher chroma color it didn't look natural anymore. Before arriving to the final result I painted over the colors on the light side of the newsstand several times. Perhaps to make the newsstand pop as much as I wanted I should have strayed a bit farther from realistic colors and made the background darker and used slightly higher chroma on the newsstand. I might still try to do that but for now I'm leaving this painting alone. Either way it was a good exercise to get back into plein air painting. Let me know what you think in the comments here, or on my Instagram.
The last couple of weeks I've been very tired and also a bit burned out with plein air painting, I think, so I took a bit of a break. In the meantime I did paint a bit at home, and I did a couple of pencil sketches from life around town, which was already a refreshing break from plein air painting but evidently I needed another week or so. Then I felt ready to give it a shot again, so I headed to a spot I'd had my eye on for a while; a little seemingly out-of-use newsstand. As an added exercise after taking such a long break I tried to go for a more realistic color palette. Usually I prefer a muted palette, or sometimes brighter more saturated colors, usually to communicate luminosity. In this case the actual scene was a bit in between, sunlit but the subject isn't very colorful and it was slightly cloudy as well. I thought using more true-to-life colors would suit the subject better but it proved to be a bit of a challenge, and I'm not sure it was the best choice in the end. Especially determining the local colors on the newsstand was difficult. It is a dark muted red, which proved hard to make stand out from the surroundings in the painting. If I simply brightened the color it looked too cold and if I used a higher chroma color it didn't look natural anymore. Before arriving to the final result I painted over the colors on the light side of the newsstand several times. Perhaps to make the newsstand pop as much as I wanted I should have strayed a bit farther from realistic colors and made the background darker and used slightly higher chroma on the newsstand. I might still try to do that but for now I'm leaving this painting alone. Either way it was a good exercise to get back into plein air painting. Let me know what you think in the comments here, or on my Instagram.
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