From Radio Island Towards Morehead-12x16

after the changes

before the changes

I got home from the holidays and saw alot of things i didnt like about this painting i had just finished. funny how you love a painting so much after you paint it, and if you dont see it for a few days, all the things wrong with it jump out at you.

so i thought i'd keep the two close (above) so you can scroll up and down, and see the changes made, and i'll explain why i made them.

probably the biggest change was lightening the shapes in the background. the uplifted train trestle and the horizontal shapes behind and in front of the water tower. i did this to make the background really atmospheric and lightening all those shapes makes them go farther back into the distance and makes the foreground zoom forward toward the viewer. scroll up and compare

then i took all the warm colors out of the water where i was taking too much liberty and got carried away. Problem with that is there are no warm colors in the sky like in the water, so it looked fake. once i mirrored the sky in the water (top painting) it simplified the shape calming it down and looking more realistic. i changed the columns for the bridge, keeping the value the same as the original, just changed the hue from blue-ish to purple-ish. problem with the first bridge being blue is everything was blue in the whole painting. every major shape should be a different hue, having the same value is ok. in reality every different surface is a different color because youre looking at it from different distances, its facing different directions, and its surrounded by different objects and they bounce their color onto the other object. so you can see that nothing can really be exactly the same color, even if its made of the same material.

i like the redone painting now and it more closely resembles my vision for the painting when i started it, a late afternoon, really atmospheric view of the port of morehead city.

the last thing i did was put the paint on really thick to contrast the really thin paint. adds variety and lusciousness to the painting, which is something i'm striving for. it want to start putting some really thick paint on some areas. Click the image at the top and look at the paint in the sky and water and then click the bottom and compare. i think you'll see what i mean.