Night View of Mill and River (Oil Bar Painting Day 6)

Night View of Mill and River (Oil Bar Painting Day 6) Originally uploaded by randubnick

This morning, I went to the studio at Red Brick and worked on this painting of the Merrimac River in Manchester, New Hampshire. Today I concentrated on the mill building. I mixed up a neutral color with purple tones, and got to work straightening out the windows, using the smallest brush I could find. This might sound easy, but it requires a lot of control and concentration. While I was at it, I made the windows smaller, as in an older building, so the building won't look contemporary. I also used some whites and yellows on the windows. When I was nearly finished, I decided to repaint four columns of windows because the spacing was wrong, so I roughed that in. By then, it was already past time to leave, so I turned the painting upside-down, and added some of the same purple color to the building's reflection in the water, scumbling the color on to keep the reflection looking less precise than the building itself. I am still not sure about this color for the building. I may add still more red-purple to it, to restore it to the color I used on Day 5. To be continued. . . .