venice photo

Here’s my inspiration - a photo I took in Venice earlier this year. What I like about it is the composition. There are strong dominant horizontal bands that are criss-crossed over by the wonderful vertical wooden poles, and in amongst all this is the circular arrangement of the boat, the gondolier and the steps. Your eye is lead from the front of the gondola back towards the gondolier, up his body and then back down the steps to the front of the gondola and back round again. This arrangement helps to keep the viewer in the picture, and if they do stray out of this circle, there is still much to look at and hold their attention. Things like this are critical if you want people to keep looking at your paintings!
set up
first stage

My set-up is shown here. I am painting on a piece of thin 8” x 12” hardboard, which is sitting in my outdoor oil painting box.

final stage

Step 1. (above)
I used just 4 colours of water mixable oil paints for this picture, choosing a red, a blue, a yellow and white. (Cadmium Orange, Cobalt Blue, Yellow Ochre, and Titanium White). By using just a few colours I knew that I would have no problems with keeping colour harmony within the picture and could mix some lovely muted neutrals as well as keeping some of the bright pure colours to contrast with them.

I began by sketching out the main features with some thinned down yellow ochre, and then blocked in all the large masses with something that would resemble the final colours and tones. By doing this I could then see if the picture was ‘working’ or not, before getting bogged down in too much detail.

I then left it to dry a little overnight, and came back to it with fresh ideas and fresh energy the next day
gondolier

Step 2. (above)
I now had fun refining and adding in the details. The gondolier is the focal point of the whole painting and so I began to work on him first. I needed him to have more detail and more tonal contrast here than in any other part of the painting, so that the eye would be drawn to him. Compare the detail in him with that of the other background people in the detail pictures (left and below). They are really just simple blobs of muted colour.

Much of the rest of the scene is also left deliberately loose, blurry and muted, with little detail. This pushes it all into the background and makes the gondola, gondolier, and the wooden poles (all of which are more detailed), come forward. Its almost like having two separate planes in the picture.

I especially enjoyed putting in the bright orange canopies over the shop fronts as these brought that much needed splash of pure colour into an otherwise muted scene.

background people

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