Reflections (Oil Bar Painting as of August 1, 2013)

Reflections (Oil Bar Painting as of August 1, 2013), a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

This is my oil bar painting (in progress) as it looked yesterday. This landscape is inspired and loosely based on a photo that I took last year at Bradley Palmer State Park (Topsfield, MA). The reference photo is posted here on June 14. Until yesterday, I hadn't done much with the lower right corner of the canvas, partly because in the reference photo, it was hard to see what was going on because that area was so dark. So yesterday, before I started painting, I went to the computer, opened my reference photo in Painter, and created a much lighter version of it. Suddenly I could the shapes in the water much more clearly. So I printed out a copy of the brightened version of the photo so I could refer to it while I painted. Then I got to work on the canvas, and painted dark blue and green shapes in the lower right corner.