Mings Chinese Takeaway, Newington

Another Newington landscape tidy and once again it’s using the Notanizer app. Today it’s Mings Chinese Takeaway and I’ve painted it using the desert supergranulators. I’ve never tried anything from Mings so can’t comment on how good the food is before anyone asks.

The first step, as usual, was to put down a pencil outline and reserve some white highlights with masking fluid. I then put in a sky, wet into wet, using all the desert colours except for desert green. The Notanizer app was suggesting a sky that was 100% light valued but if I’d just used desert yellow, it would have looked too similar to the main building, so I deliberately went for a sky that had a different look to the rest of the painting. Next, I added the first layer of paint. As usual with a posterised painting with the desert colours, this layer was in desert yellow and desert orange. But to distinguish the main building from everything else, I stuck to the yellow there, using the orange everywhere else, only dropping in the odd bit of yellow. I also dropped more yellow into the main building in an attempt to get some supergranulation going. After that, I put down more masking fluid to reserve some light areas (mainly brickwork), then went over the medium and dark areas with tundra brown. Then more masking fluid over areas that I wanted to reserve as medium tone (mainly brickwork again) before putting down tundra grey over the darkest areas. And after rubbing off the masking fluid, I just made one more change, adding in the faint indication of an unused door in the front of the building that I could see in my source photo but which didn’t register with the Notanizer app. And that was me done.

I’m reasonably happy with this one, even if the perspective seems slightly off, looking at the top of the front of the takeaway and the angles of the top of the roof and the horizontal brown bar underneath it. Just like with the last painting, there’s both the feeling of this being an old photo and the impression of the sun shining. I think I got lucky when I went out taking photos t the weekend and somebody in a white t–shirt strolled out of the Co–Op. He makes this painting.

This one’s not going up for sale immediately but is being held back for a potential exhibition stand at a Newington church event in August.