Winter Drive at Sunset (Oil Bar Painting as of June 11, 2013)

Winter Drive at Sunset (Oil Bar Painting as of June 11, 2013), a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

I started another oil bar painting a few days ago, a snow scene, loosely based on a photo that I took back in 2008 on a winter drive on Route 128, north of Boston. (I posted the reference photo here on Monday.) This is how the painting looked yesterday. (I am a day behind in posting.) When I started the painting, I quickly established the composition, working without a grid. Yesterday I decided that this had been a mistake. The proportions were wrong and there wasn't enough room to do justice to that amazing sky. So even though I liked the composition that I already had, and even though I was pretty happy with the colors in the sky, I decided to fix the problem. So yesterday I created a grid on the reference photo and then taped off grid marks around the edge of the painting, and then I began to move things around. I changed the position of the road and the dark hillside, and then changed the position of the cloud formations. That's a lot of moving around, but I managed to keep a lot of the colors in the sky that I liked. The hillside is going to be blue (not deep fuscia), but because I was making changes, I wanted to use a color that I could really see. The fuscia hillside looks crazy in this view, but it will fade away into the blues and purples that I plan to use later on. It was a big pain to make these changes, but I like the composition better now.