Late night with work so I didn’t get to start painting until a little before 11pm. I worked over an hour on it but I just put down an hour for the total time. I started with the reductive method and quickly established a composition with good relative values. I was going for a flow of the painting from bottom left corner to the top right corner. I also wanted to tone down the values a bit and make it somewhat darker. Darkening the relative values is a good thing for several reasons. The main one being that paint can almost never reach the brightest light in a subject.
It’s a pretty rough start to the painting even though it took me over an hour. I’m not too worried about it though, if there is one thing that I have learned in Jamie Bollenbach’s class is to save the details for later and establish the bigger picture first. In other words, tomorrow is going to be much more fun when I continue with it.
The Setup
The reductive start of the painting
