I Said In That Case I’ll Have A Manhattan. She Said Fine. And In Thirty Seconds Time…

Sorry.  Been watching too many Rate My Takeaway videos on YouTube.

Anyway, back to painting today after taking a few days off to read some books and play some chess.  Someone messaged me this morning asking if I’d be interested in a commission, with a painting made up of six mini paintings of alcoholic drinks that he could put up in his home bar.  So what else could I do?  I said I’ll see what I can do.  See what I did there?  No, actually I told him lifes weren’t really my forte, especially when I’d need to be adding all sorts of highlights and reflections.  But it did get me thinking and I came up with the idea for another alcohol-themed painting while I was in the shower.

It’s a row of bottles that’s been made to look like an evening Manhattan skyline.  And then the bottom of the painting is their reflection in the water, except that I’ve gone for a daytime sky and the sort of colours in the reflections that I might use for trees.  There’s some inspiration from one of the two jigsaws that I used in It’s A Jungle Out There!  Click on the jigart label at the top of the page and you’ll find it there.

Obviously I started by searching online for photos, then drawing a skyline and adding highlights and lit up windows using masking fluid.  I don’t know why but I had to start it somewhere, so I started there.  Oh, I’m good at this.

Then the nighttime side.  The sky was Winsor orange with bits of permanent rose, permanent alizarin crimson and Winsor violet thrown in.  Maybe I should say at this point that this painting isn’t in a particular colour scheme.  Rather than being based on three primaries, I’ve thrown in all sorts of colours from my 24-halfpan palette.  Then the buildings/bottles went on in indigo.  There are also bits of all four sky colours in there, some underneath the indigo and glazed over, some just dropped in.  It was a hot day today and the paint was drying fast; normally this is a bad thing but today it meant I was able to add a second coat of indigo over some of the bottles to separate them.

Then the daytime side.  I started by thoroughly wetting the whole half page.  Then I painted on some French ultramarine with some dabs of viridian in places and allowed it to do it’s thing.  While it was drying, though, I added some wet into wet bottle reflections that I also allowed to do their own thing.  I varied the colour along the row using sap green, olive green, permanent rose, permanent alizarin crimson, Winsor violet and maybe some yellow ochre.  The violet was looking a bit dark valued, so I did a lot of dabbing of this and indeed all the reflections with a paper towel.

Final result?  Not my best to be honest.  The orange sky looks amazing as always though.  It kind of guarantees that the will be something good about a painting so it might be a good safety net to save any embarrassment if I’m on the telly.

It’s in the reject pile – I don’t want it lowering the average standard of what’s in the shop window.