New Artwork: Chicago L Train Crossing Street

Hello everyone, I'm back from my trip and with a finished Yupo painting for you, as always the large version file. I have more paintings to post, however they'd midway through getting scanned and cleaned up.

This painting is based on a photo I took while I was in Chicago last year to do a talk about animation with Umami. We mostly got stuck in the burbs, then had 1 day to do the art museum and walk around as much as possible. I was most struck by the elevated train system, aside from the sheer scale of absolutely everything. Everything really is 2 or 3 times the size of what's in Canada. Montreal feels like a miniature set compared to Chicago.

Reference photo. I moved the parked car up & edited out some distracting details in Photoshop.

I didn't take many progress pics of this one. I think I worked on it several times on stream. This is painted on Yupo paper, which is synthetic paper that gives a really moist look but is very hard to work with. Basically, the painting is completely unstable and I can erase it at any moment. It makes building up layers hard.

Last time I painted a cityscape on Yupo, it was in darkness. I think that worked better or I don't know how to treat daylight yet.

Very wet beginning. My buildings quickly started to lean. I have yet to figure out how to keep straight lines on such a volatile medium.

Critique

Since this is a closed community, I can admit I am not really happy with this painting. It feels like it lacks a focus, too busy with the detail. I asked for critique from others, and people came back to say there's little distinction between the different planes & shapes - the sidewalk, the background buildings from the foreground. It's a little too like the photo, because I wanted to emulate the glowing light on the red building and ended up being sucked into the details. Emulating the light proved to be very difficult with this medium as controlling the values is done by mixing the exact hue & value as if watercolor is acrylic. It's very strange and different to wrap my head around. The paint is behaving more like a mixture of acrylic & oily ink than watercolor. Getting sucked into details is an average artist mistake and usually happens to me when I have too many other things on my mind since painting details is so meditative and satisfying.

I'm still going to put this painting out there, and then move onto the next one. I have a good sense of what went wrong and what to do better.

First dibs on the finished painting - the birthday sale is still active until the 24th for this or any other art you'd want to grab without using your Patron codes!