Killer on the Road: Part Three

I've put two photos on this one so that there aren't so many parts to this post. From here on out things go pretty smoothly.

I want the fields to contrast with the sky but part of them go under the city so I take some left over gray from the buildings and use it to get the general shape of the land. The sharp eye will also notice that I added some more sky to the left side of the city since the land was going to dip down right there.

Then I took a step back and realized that the buildings looked flat, so I used some lighter and darker paint to put some streaky details in the buildings. I liked the looks of this but it still needed some detail.

In my other paintings I usually put in lighted windows to show someone is home, but in this one I thought leaving them out would be better. But after standing back and looking at the painting I realized that the city wasn't alive yet and needed the windows. I mixed up a light orangey color that seemed to fit with the other colors. I took my small liner brush, and using just the tip, put in some windows in a grid pattern which brightened things up.

In the lower picture I started to add the color to the fields. Since I already had the gray there, I wasn't sure how they would mix together.

I often wonder what people think of artists. Do they think that they get this complete idea in their head and then just go about putting it on canvas like a paint by number? Or do people realize that there are many, many steps and decisions that are performed while the painting is taking form, and that the artist probably has as much foreknowledge of what it's going to look like as them. When a painting is finished, I'm usually as surprised as anyone else as to how it turned out.

Well anyway, I use the red to help define the final shape of the road. If you look at the gray on the left side of the city you will see a sharper drop off than later on in the red. I didn't like the way the road didn't quite look as if it was getting smaller with distance, so I rechecked my sketch and sure enough that part needed to be flattened out and the drop off placed further down the road.

After that, I started putting in the furrows of the field. I knew that I wanted them to fade into gray at the ends but at this point I wasn't too concerned with them. As I learned in the next step I should have been thinking harder about how I wanted the final painting to look.

(To be continued.)