Painting Finished: April 1, 2022
For the first painting, I decided to emulate Markino’s Marlborough Road, Chelsea: Saturday Night. The painting is entirely done in black paint which means I would be able to solely focus on the texturing and saturation rather than having to also experiment with color. Depending on how dark I wanted the coloring to be, I either dipped my brush directly into the black paint or mixed it with water on my palette.
My first step was to create a light grey wet wash. You can see in here, that I have a heavier concentration of color on the right side because that’s where I had decided to place the buildings. The left side, in contrast, is fairly colorless. Originally, I was thinking of doing a square in the space to the left, so I wanted it to be lighter so that I could get greater contrast for the people walking about, kind of like the reversal of
Markino’s which has a sidewalk and road
on the right. In the end, however, I decided it looked like a lake and I allowed my whimsy to do whatever it wanted, using Markino’s painting as a reference on how to accomplish haze and form.
Next, I decided to better shape the outline of the buildings as well as start to outline the lamp post. To attain the hazy look to the building, I dipped my brush in water constantly and often “scrubbed” with my brush to blend any hard lines. You can see in this photo that there is a slight shine to the paper from the water I used to blend the base of the stone lion.
For the lamp post, I used a liner brush which is how I was able to get such clean, thin lines. Then I used various mixtures of black paint and water to shade the object, often placing plain water in the paper to blur and line and to spread the paint. I also, if you look closely at the photo below this one, copied how Markino did the light bulb by painting a light circle and then shading a little in order to get the 3D effect.
Lastly, I painted a figure of a woman at the right bottom corner. She is seen wearing a hat and a cloak very similar to the styles in Markino’s piece. I used similar shading techniques for her as I did for the lamppost. If you look below, here is the workspace I used. I painted on my desk so there is a lot of random stuff, but the lamp on the left really helped me to see what I was doing especially if I was painting at night.
