This is a photograph of what I am currently painting. With work getting busy it's been awhile since I've worked on it but I thought I'd share the progress anyway - that's the point of this blog, right? :) Anyway, it's the driver side dash board of one of the cars the military put into the Knik River bank to help stop/slow bank erosion over by the hatchery. There's quite a lot of interesting stuff over there besides cars: stoves, refrigerators, barrels, old tin cans with still-readable labels... Some of the cars were in the bank and some weren't doing much as far as erosion prevention and were just sitting along the river, making for scenic abandoned photography. I plan to paint some of those, as they're probably more appealing to folks, but I liked the dash on this car and thought I could play up the contrast in the blue distant background/chrome and the orange rust.
Left: The canvas with the final sketch on it before I start blocking everything in.
Right: is the first phase of blocking. Currently it has more shadows and some of the birch trees semi-blocked into the blue distant background but this is pretty close. Color-wise, the painting won't really resemble the photograph, which is pretty common for me as I tend to paint pretty saturatedly, which I like. For instance, the Generator/Compressor original photograph was really washed out, the rust was more purple-looking, and the overal image was cold. I'm no photographer - when I take photos I'm more concerned about composition, subject, and angle of light, in that order. Everything else I can make up.
This piece will be a challenge. I had to teach myself how to do rust on the Generator/Compressor and hopefully I've retained something from that but I've not done moss before - and I don't want to do it in the 'easy' Bob Ross style. I will be playing down the moss and concentrating on bringing out the chrome in good contrast - it's all about the dashboard, "Battery/Fuel" (yay for slash names!) :)
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