Night Mechanics

On a whim I made this night painting of the Joe and Ralph auto shop on Somerled Avenue, seen from the Metro grocery store (formerly Steinbergs Grocer) looking West. From this angle you can see the front of the shop, and the windows where a customer and two employees were standing behind a counter, maybe it was Joe and Ralph? The gas pump is on the left, it has its own two lamps each with two bulbs. To compose this scene I adjusted the perspective to be on a one point perspective, even though I was standing on an angle. That means that in the painting, you feel like you are standing right in front of the building. It was a subtle adjustment, but a difficult one to make on the spot. Since I have pyrol orange (PO73) again, I could make that sensational dark blue sky by mixing it with indothrene blue (PB60). Both of those pigments are high chroma, and the resulting mix is an intense dark blue or dark purple if you add more of the orange. In the top left corner you can see how dark the mix was, and yet it still has a sharp, purple grape juice look to it. To make the stars in the sky I dragged the brush then filled in the areas to leave small white dots of paper showing through. There were no stars in the actual scene, but I wanted the sky to look like a Van Gogh painting! At something below zero, I had to use salt in the water, and wear my mitts with deerskin gauntlet on top, so believe it or not I managed this painting while wearing the equivalent of oven mitts. Its one of those skills that a winter-painter must learn. The name by the way, was a play on Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. 

Night Mechanics,  watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, November 2023 (No. 3408b)