Final on Bike

 Just finished this one  *whew! *  It's a crazy, hot ride, and quite big; I think it's 24x36.

If you look closely, you can see that all the cool colors were laid down first.  Well, actually FIRST I had Noah take about 23 pictures of me on my bike!

The selection process went on for some time.  Once I narrowed it down, there were a number of sketches on paper to decide exactly which part I wanted to focus upon.

Once I'd chosen the pictures I wanted to work from, I laid down the blues, greens and turquoises.  My goal was to paint in the negative space, AROUND the subject, leaving it wild and colorful.


Allowing the first layers to dry, I took charcoal and drew in the bike and my leg.  The charcoal drawing took me several days as it was exacting.

 I think I worked on it for a week or two to get exactly the negative space I wanted painted in, bringing the subject forward and having the background recede.  As you can see, there are parts of the background darker than others, to make the painting more interesting.

At this point, adding shadows took several days as well, and unifying and finessing the entire painting.  I probably spent a week on it.

At the end, I added layers of oranges, reds and hot pinks in focused drips to give movement to the painting. Believe it or not, it's pretty difficult to make the drips look as though it was easy laying them down!  As these are all warm colors, they seem to float on top of the blues which adds to the depth.

Here I have close ups of several portions of the painting.  I like it!