Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Vanished Friends

 
Hi everybody and a Happy New Year to all!
This shows the progression of a page I
did for The Virtual Paintout for January 2015 where
 the theme for the entire month is Philadelphia.
We can upload up to 3 on the site each month
and this month I may only do one as I have
some other exciting classes to  attend.
Below is the initial pencil sketch done from a
Google Street view I found...that I liked
so many of the details and the two boys
on the steps....I darken the work to
upload so you can see it much better...but it
was quite light.
the next photo show the inking done and that is
also darkened...and not as easy to see as the
scan is. I included the pen which I like
for some work but it turned out it was too thin
for this one and I went over the lines in the end with my
favorite Uniball Vision waterproof fine pen.,,,it
gave me the punch I wanted.  Also I took
this whole work very slowly and you see some of the
notes I made of observations I wanted to
keep in mind. I don't usually do this and thought
 it helped me a lot. 

Here is the final work done in tube watercolors
using waterbrushes for most of it..This street
was tree lined and some people had plants
under the windows etc.  This place
 may have seeds started in the little
 plot by the steps.  The reflections were from
similar houses across the street and trees.
Since this is a small work, about
8 by 5 inches, I left out the coffee cup and
can of soda between the boys...
As I worked on this the song
The Streets of Philadelphia played
over and over in my head and other
thoughts combined to make this a statement
for me on the ones we knew and lost through
the years to the streets or elsewhere---each with
poignant memories and the hope that
all was as it had to be....
 
 


8 comments:

winna said...

I do hope many of you will comment and let me know what you think...it helps me a lot to read them and think of what you write.


the "I'm not a robot" is something I didn't add to my site, but it's there...well, I got it right and they let me publish this comment. yeah !

owenswain said...

A lovely work of art and word!

P.S. the I am not a robot chapata is a very good thing. Protects you from spam. :-)

Anonymous said...

Whoa....Since I started following you in Flickr, I was delighted to have a little bon-bon with each of your paintings, sketches and other works of art.

Now, with this excellent web site, I've been admitted to the candy store. It's going to be fun exploring.

Anonymous said...

PS...I'm not a fan of Google so I set this as "anonymous",so should have signed the above.

Br.i.an
aka Starkrusher

winna said...

Glad to have your visit Star !

john.p said...

Thanks for walking us through your process. You really invest yourself in the painting. It turned out great! The Uni pen you used is new to me. I need to check it out.

john.p said...

In reading your last few posts I see that both of us took a similar time-out from posting, and I can tell you're also wondering if you should get back into it. There are so many other bloggers falling away. Hope you continue as I enjoy your work. You have such a capacity to capture your local scenes. I figure I'll continue for a while and see how it feels. Aren't we both in the Every Day Matters group. That group has sure fallen to it's knees. Hope there's better days ahead in the blogging world.

harry bell said...

Struggling to get back to blogging again, I thought I'd visit one or two old contacts, only to discover a lack of activity. As John P says, so many other bloggers falling away. Perhaps blogging has had it's day and everyone has moved to other social media like Facebook. I hope not.

Anyway, good to see you're still around and making lovely drawings.