Painting Finished: April 11, 2022
Now, I'm going to try to recreate Markino's Outside St. George's Hospital with its gloomy but fun color scheme. I began by doing a wash of grey with a lot of muted variants of pink, purple, blue, purple, etc, darkening the areas when needed and keeping others lighter to keep the overall contrast. Then I started lightly painting the most prominent features of the painting (the umbrellas).
I began with the umbrellas to help position and proportion the rest of the painting, although I admit, in the end, I had to add some figures and shift things around to make it all work. I began to darken and add more layers to the background. Then, I realized I had forgotten to leave white space for the lights and the light's reflection (which I'm sure Markino was always careful about). I
fixed it by taking small piece of paper
towel wadding it up into a point, dipping it in water and using that to pick up the color.
Once that was done, I started really to create the right texture for the road and getting the lighting effects right. I added some yellow around the street lamps and added more shadow to contrast with the light. Then I worked on the reflections in the road. I started by taking a thin flat brush and painted colored lines lengthwise across the road. Then I took another brush (dry) across it to make the
lines blur.
After that, I began the silhouettes. I'm especially proud of the horse statue and the powerlines to the right side (which I at first thought to be smoke). Depending on the distance, I would use lighter or deeper shades of black. Then I started to make the outlines of the group of figures in front, starting with their face because it was the lighter part (always start from light to dark) and to help positioning.
Slowly, the figures started to fill in and I mixed various amounts of paint and water to get the necessary shading to create depth. I ended up with a bit of extra space (where the figures aren't yet painted) then was in the original painting and so I added a few vague figures in the distance and blurred in some darker colors to make it look right. See the finished painting and my palette (with all the wadded paper
towel pieces) below.
