I’m two days into a new painting and its coming along quick.  It’s smaller than I’m used to working with, but the advantage here is speed.

Over the last few years, I have shot a ton of photos.  Usually I try to work several together into my large collage style paintings.  After browsing through my sets on Flickr, I kind of felt that many should be interesting little character sketches in their own right.  I’m once again going to try something I don’t normally do, and work on these little pieces concurrently with my larger pieces.

Here we go off into uncharted territory, so I think it’s fitting that I start with a plane that was out at the War Eagles Museum.

Stop at 700 Mundy, 48″ X 36″, oil on canvas, 2012

Finished!

As I near the completion of the Sunset Grocery Building, I have started to kick around some other ideas for my next painting.  Some places I’ve already visited have given me lots of material like the Smelter Cemetery and the SPC Plant.  Those are pretty grand in scale and may result in some sort of a series. For my next painting I wanted to try something a little smaller in scale so I headed back downtown and scouted around.  Instead of wandering all over the place like I normally, do I focused on the Plaza Hotel and surrounding area.

There was some construction going inside, no doubt in preparation for making it usable again for some future tenants.  Personally, I would rather see the city use the Blue Flame building if they raze the current city hall to build a ballpark.  The Plaza would be better suited as a hotel given its proximity to the the Arts district.  Maybe it would force the Camino Real, that’s next door, to spruce up its aging property.

This part of downtown is my favorite. The majority of the buildings around here are older and part of the national historic registry.  There are some art deco-ish relics as well, namely the Kress Building and the American Furniture sign.

I’ve used this area before for inspiration, in the Plaza Monk and American Furniture paintings, so I guess I risk beating a dead horse.  There is something here though or I wouldn’t keep coming back. What to paint, what to paint…

Plaza Hotel on Flickr

The final color blocking is done and I’ve started the final detail work.  This is where it starts to move pretty quick. Glazing and detailing really bring out the image.  The next update should have it close to finished.

I finished the brickwork and have started blocking in the base colors for the wood work.  Once the building colors are all blocked in I’ll start the detail and shadow work.  The last step will be the repeating pattern on the color band and this one will be wrapped up.