Esso gas station at night

Another day another deadline passes, like the sun going down it will always come up again. Here is a painting of the gas station on Sherbrooke that recently became an Esso, hence the bright red trim. To paint this scene, I applied the sky first in dark blue, a mix of sapphire blue PB15 with navy blue PB60. Then I painted over with the clouds, which was the same mix but with yellow ochre (PY43). As usual it is very hard to properly judge colours at night, although I had the portable bike light to peek and see if it was about right. Compared to painting in the comfort of your home studio, painting on location adds a couple of points to the difficulty scale. This painting was about a 7/10 on the difficulty scale. By comparison, gas station on a sunny day was easier, probably 6/10, while gas station on a snowy night was probably 9/10 difficulty. Its just an imaginary scale I have to think about how hard a scene is, it depends on subject matter, weather, and other factors like where I am standing. For example, Chateau Frontenac was about the most difficult thing I could paint, while the Ice Flow Dieppe park was about as miserably cold and windy of a location and I even had to finish that one at home. And speaking of auto shops there was auto shop on a rainy night, where I stood on the corner getting blasted by ice cold rain while trying to hold an umbrella, brush, palette and paper all at once. But the challenge is part of the fun, if every painting was sky, trees and grass on a sunny day... well, actually that sounds pretty good.

Esso gas station at night, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2024