Today, I painted over the charcoal sketch outlines in order to keep the composition as close to what I initially envisioned. If you look close, you can see that I also added the Lake Street El Train in front of the old grain silos just to the left of center. I also added a little color to add depth and to start playing with ideas for color scheme.
Yesterday, I sold this painting - special thanks to my friends and art collectors, Bill and Laura!
This painting is the first time I worked to combine city imagery with portraits. I'm looking to do more of that down the road and I'll look back to this piece or inspiration. The title is taken from a song of the same name from New Order's album, Movement.
It's one of my favorite paintings from my people series and I'll miss it, but I know it's going to a good home! I hear it will be given a prime spot over the fireplace mantle...
The photos have been taken and sketches done on paper. The next step in the commission painting was to get the composition down with charcoal on canvas.
So far, the art projects are falling into place: a couple of sales, a commission painting as well as a potential art reproduction project for a hotel.
I've started working on some sketches for the commission painting. The collectors live in the West Loop area of Chicago and requested a cityscape featuring rooftop water tanks. Below are the initial sketches done with charcoal and graphite on paper, along with some photos I shot for inspiration and compositional ideas.
Sketches:
Continuing my series of water tank paintings with these two works in progress. They're at the beginning stages, building up the layers quickly and trying to keep them loose.
I'm inspired by my recent trip to New York where I took a lot of photographs of water tanks in SoHo, The Village and the Lower East Side. In the past month, I have also done some Chicago walkabouts, taking photos of water tanks and architecture in River North and the Loop to provide some inspiration.
Worked some more layers into this painting the last few days. Definitely more to go, but I'm liking the color palate and the looser feel.
Previously, I haven't incorporated many fire escapes into my paintings, but I'm liking it so far. It brings a more urban feel to the composition, creating strong diagonal shapes that lead your eye across the canvas.
I put the finishing touches on these paintings this week. The one in the middle is acrylic on panel and the other two are acrylic on canvas. For some of the detailed work I used conté crayons. Available soon on my website.
