St Paul's Cathedral London in early Autumn - WIP stages

St Paul's Cathedral London in early Autumn - WIP stages

Stages of the oil painting of St Pauls, in central London

St Paul's cathedral, situated in central London is the famous subject of this painting, created during late 2019 and early 2020. The building is seen from Cannon Street, with various buses using the road. The panel above shows three stages of the painting in progress. In the first panel can be seen the drawing of the scene, done in dark brown acrylic paint on a brown ground or 'wash'. Tonally bright areas, such as the sky, have been painted in white acrylic paint. The idea at this stage is to suggest the underlying forms in the painting and how the tones will work throughout the image. Moving on the second panel shows a half way stage where colours have been added using diluted oil paint. This is the under-painting, and the colours are there to give an indication of the placement of the paint and there tonal range. The final panel now shows the finished painting. Here the paint has been applied over the previous paint in a thicker, but more careful manner. At the same time details are painted in. The artwork of this London scene can be seen in greater detail by following this link.

Working on closeup 65

Working on closeup 65

 A small snippet of a London bus painting...

Bus queue in the rain

BUS QUEUE IN THE RAIN

This is an older painting of mine, done in Photoshop during 2006. It is quite cartoony, with the characters having black spots for the eyes rather than fully painted ones. There is quite a lot of dark humour in this image, particually with the cat right in front of the bus wheel, about to be run over. Also in the fact that the woman is in difficulties and her plastic shopping bag has split, with some of the contents spilling out. A surreal touch is the monkey on the top deck. I did wonder about giving the bus a 'disapproving' face, but the headlights seem to work as eyes anyway!
I was thinking of 'Reg Varney', from TV's 'On the Buses' when drawing the bus driver.

from the website...

This was digitally painted in 2008 in photoshop at 10"x8" size. The scene depicts a rainy, depressing day in the UK with various accidents awaiting to happen, like the shopping bag about to break or the cat about to be run over. The bus driver is sitting smoking a cigarette, and could not care less. The monkey adds a bit of surrealism. The rain and the reflections were fun to explore and the red double decker bus is not a london bus but a made up one. It could be argued that the headlights on the bus are eyes! The crinkled destination blind and number in the wrong place are something that I am reminded of when I think of these old types of buses.