This is the last of the grey car studies since this month and it’s project is over. The next step would be to take them to finished work but I am not sure what that might look like, perhaps more of a scene than individual portraits? And they are portraits. All my cars are anthromorphic. In the long hours of their painting great tales begin to be imagined about their thoughts and feelings. This one is lonely and wistful. What is significant about that river? (I do wonder if all paintings become self portraits.)
To finish up I’ll show some of my process. This one was just three layers (the first was a crazy scrub-in to get the basic shapes and positions, which I forgot to photograph, but can still be seen in the trees). The second layer, shown here, has some refinement. Decisions are beginning to be made, but it is still rough and optional.
Next layer is about narrowing down the options and making up my mind where things will be. I decided the river was more important – so made it wider and shaped up the shrubbery to let more be seen. With each decision like that there are more to be made. (My personal take on Murphy’s Law is that ‘Every problem solved, creates two more!’) In this case the brightness of the water needed to be balanced by darkness. The shadow should be the darkest, but the car is already dark. So the car must go lighter, so the shadow can go darker. Etc. Etc. That’s why they take so long.
