NDG Somerled Street

Somerled has never been painted so much by an artist! The sun was just going down when I went out to make this painting on location yesterday evening. It was very cold, a chilly breeze and near freezing temperatures which made it hard to complete the painting without numb fingers. This view is looking eastward, sitting on the corner across from my building. Without even thinking about it, I created a kind of Japanese composition, with the strong triangle shapes of the sidewalk, and the foregrounded sign post going off the top of the picture. My initials and the year are inscribed on the bottom of the sign.

After all these years I have never had an orange paint in my palette. I figured you can just mix red and yellow to get orange, which is true, but when you do that it makes for very muddy mixtures when combined with a third colour, and it makes glazing kind of messy. In this painting I used azo orange (PO62) from Schmincke to glaze over the side of the building and the sign post support in order to create the effect of setting sun. It is also in the green shrubs and the tops of the trees that were catching the last of the sun.The rest of the picture is mostly burnt sienna with various tints, the sky is phthalo blue (PB15) and the sign azo yellow light (PY154).

5 x 7" rough press, 140lb watercolour block. March 2020