A Splash of Color

Archive for the ‘Cityscape’ Category

The location for this month’s was Prague, which has been on my to-go list for a while now. More so after the virtual travel. I totally loved traversing around the city with google street view. Such beautiful bridges everywhere. Any city with a lot of bridges and water makes me fall in love with it immediately. Amsterdam, Strasbourg all fall in that category. I think that holds good with Prague too, and the husband endorsed it completely. Well he has visited Prague and I almost disowned him for going there without me.:(

With my brushes being used only to sign these days and me working almost exclusively with the knife, I was looking at things differently. As in, searching for a view that would be more knife-friendly to paint. I shortlisted a lot of bridge and river views, but loved this building on first sight. This is a very typical European building with charming windows et al. It was a delight to paint. I like how the red building came out, but do not like the adjacent building. I want to try painting this some other time.

The Red Building
Palette Knife on board, 5 by 7 inches
© Nithya Swaminathan
View in Street View

With every month’s paint out, I get to marvel more and more at the awesome technology. What would I do without Google, I wonder! Let me know what you think of the painting.

The Virtual Paintout for this month is the San Francisco Bay Area. The Virtual Paintout blog is a year old now, and Bill has decided that we will paint the Bay Area as a tribute to Google for the first anniversary.:)

Now I have never been to SFO, and the only idea of SFO that I have is from the paintings of Karin Jurick. I had painted some Victorian houses last year in one of the DSFDF challenges. Karin also had couple of SFO cityscapes for some of the challenges, but I did not participate in them. So instead of looking all over the Bay Area, I restricted my search only to San Francisco City.

San Francisco Cityscape – A work in progress
© Nithya Swaminathan

As is my usual practice, I spent an obscene amount of time obsessing with Google Street view and took a lot of images. I loved so many images while traveling virtually, but when I looked at them together to select which view to paint, I found all of them rather boring. So I tried various enhancements to the images and then finally decided to paint them with intensely saturated colors. With maximum color saturation, even a mundane cityscape looked quite interesting. This one is not yet complete, but I posted it anyway since today is the deadline. I will be completing this soon and would also paint a few of the other SFO images that I have saved. Only after looking at the image in the monitor, I also realized that there are some tweaks needed too. Stay tuned for the completed painting in a couple of days. Until then, I think I will go back to wishing for Spring with some more flowers.

Check out various views of the Bay Area at the blog. It is a beautiful virtual tour!

As I mentioned sometime last month, I hosted the Different Strokes challenge in the Acrylics forum of WetCanvas for the month of Feb. This was one of the references I provided. This image is from the little French town of Colmar, taken when we visited this place in the Spring of 2008. It is a very charming little town in the Alsace wine growing region of France. I loved this arch and the lighting, the tables set up nicely, and the atmosphere. It has been on my to-paint list for longer than I can remember and I decided this was the best chance. I wasn’t quite sure if everyone would be inspired by this subject, so I gave another street cafe scene as yet another option. Most of the people painted the arch however, to my pleasant surprise.

Le Restaurant
Acrylics on Canvas, 12 x 16 inches
© Nithya Swaminathan

I tried playing around with some structure paste for the outer walls of the building. On top of the paste, I used the palette knife to color the walls. I wanted a lot of texture to the walls, to make them stand out and to draw the viewer into the scene. The inside was painted with the brush. I could’ve done a better job with the overall lighting is what I think. I might tweak it a bit, adding a few highlights and some more darks. Let’s see.

I also hope that this paintings motivates me to get started on Europe cityscapes. With tons of references from all over Europe, every time I think of starting a series, I get distracted with something more interesting. Meanwhile, your feedback is welcome on this one!

This is the painting that I am working on currently, a cityscape clicked during one of the Christmas Markets that we visited last month. This picture is from the Weihnachtsmarkt of Stuttgart. Cityscapes are new for me, absolutely unknown territory and building perspective generally gives me jitters. I am trying to work on some of my weakest areas in landscape painting, viz. buildings and a general feel of distance. It is also shot from an interesting angle, from atop one of the rides we went in. I am not sure if this qualifies as an aerial view, it is like a balcony view perhaps

Weihnachtsmarkt Stuttgart – WIP
Acrylics on Canvas, 16 * 20 inches
© Nithya Swaminathan

This is only part of the painting, the backdrop so to say. There is a lot more activity in the foreground and we are not yet there. I am taking this one slowly, as I don’t want to mess it up Watch this space for more updates, and the finished painting hopefully next week.

We had visited Luxembourg City last year, in the summer of 2008. It is a very beautiful little town, with more bridges than people Every few yards that you walk, you will spot a bridge. A very charming atmosphere that is quite typical of most European cities, and a pleasure to walk around. The visit was more memorable for us, because we had a small accident on our way back that left me with a fractured finger for  a few weeks. So in order to preserve the nice and not so nice memories, I thought I’d paint an image from the place.

Summer in Luxembourg
Acrylics on Canvas, 8 * 10 inches on gallery wrapped canvas
Copyright Nithya Swaminathan

On browsing through my images, I just loved the atmosphere in this one. The bright sun, colorful flowers and everything else. This photo actually had us in it and my daughter keeps nagging me why I have removed her! I take a lot of photos with an intention to paint them, but end up painting something else because I love the background and we just happen to be there! Funny ain’t it?!

This might be the last painting I am posting for this year, so I’d like to wish all my readers a fantastic New Year. See you all in 2010 with lots more Art!