Still Amazed (Oil Bar Painting Day 7)

Still Amazed (Oil Bar Painting Day 7)
Originally uploaded by randubnick

This is an oil bar painting in progress. I am working from a photograph that I took last summer of an amazing sunset, seen from Obear Park in Beverly's Ryal Side neighborhood. (The reference photo is posted here on March 28.) Today it was a real struggle to find any time to work on this at all. Since time was short, I decided to focus on placement of the reflections in the water. I also decided to turn the canvas upside down (and turned the reference photo upsidedown as well.) Sounds like a crazy thing to do, I guess, but I usually do that at least once in the painting process. Well, of course it is easier to paint the bottom part of the canvas that way. But the real reason I do it is that it is also a great way to check what I am actually seeing against what I think I am seeing. With the canvas upsidedown, I took my big T-square and worked on getting the reflections of the light rays in the water to line up with the corresponding rays of light above the cloud formation. In the process, I worked a little bit on both areas. And then I had to stop. But I am glad I made a little bit of progress today.