Nearly 8 years ago I did this painting of the San Rafael Swell, and it has languished unsold in galleries ever since, and I'm tired of looking at all of the mistakes. It was the best I could do at the time, but there's an upcoming art show that I want to enter, and rather than buy a new frame, I thought "I've got this huge framed elephant of a piece, I should just paint over it!" So I went back to the original photo ref and tried to reinterpret it with a little more experience as a guide. The bottom piece is a loose color-key painted this morning in Photoshop, and I tried to really focus on the different types of light (i.e. direct light, fill light, bounce light, etc), light direction, and local color. I'll use the key as reference as I move forward to paint over the old painting. Fortunately the original was painted when I was very timid about thick paint, so there shouldn't be too much of a problem going over it, and the super-warm tone of the original will be very vibrant as an underpainting. The show drop-off is late March, so I'll need to be speedy, which is good and will force me to look at the big picture and not get caught up in details, which is always death to a painting. I'll post the re-painted piece in a few weeks!
Good luck, i should say good work, but it seems that you start well, the color key is already way better than the original painting and also better than the photoref: i like the atmospheric effect you use on the back ground, maybe you could unbalanced the effect, more effect at the bottom of the background cliff and less on the top.
ReplyDeletecan't wat to see the final painting.
Thanks for the feedback Laurent!
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