The sky once again had that orange-yellow tint that I replicated with a diluted wash of yellow (PY154) and orange (PO62) paint. You can see the dense rush-hour traffic on the Decarie autoroute which is below ground level. I'd rather be standing by my bike painting this scene than sitting down in a car stuck in the traffic. To complete the illusion of yellow-glow, I added yellow tinting to the tops of the vehicles, and over the asphalt. When painting this many cars I try to capture the patterns and shapes rather than exact details.
Hazy day Decarie, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, July 2025
Looking to the south from the same spot, this is the view down Decarie Blvd where rows of cars were waiting to turn and get into NDG. Busses were also plentiful, the Villa Maria metro station is just to my left from this position. With scenes like this, the perspective and the scaling of the objects is tricky, to get it close I hold up the brush to find the angles, and then hold up the paper to see the relative position of things.
View down Decarie Blvd, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, July 2025
For those of you who don''t know, I completed a series of paintings at each of the
68 stations of the Montreal Metro, that link takes you to a page summarizing all the blogs, mostly done from 2020 - 2022. The page has more than 250 views which is a lot for my blog, so it must be somewhat popular. During the pandemic it was one thing to do, and in fact, the absence of traffic, people and clear blue sky made for some great painting conditions. At the time, this metro was under construction so the best I could do was a
winter scene of it behind construction fences. The concrete was so clean here after the renovation that I hardly knew how to best paint it, usually the concrete is toasty and stained. If there is one thing I learned from painting all the metro stations, its how to paint concrete!
Villa Maria station complete, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, July 2025
No comments:
Post a Comment