Emerald Sunset Study

"Emerald Sunset Study"
6"x6" Oil on Gessoboard
$120 Unframed
Click Here to Purchase

I had a really tough time with this one. The shophouse is pretty much silhouetted, but I didn't want it to be flat. I really wanted to get the correct shadow colors. In the end I really feel like I did a good job with it, and I love how realistic it looks. One of the toughest parts of it was getting the dark red color correct. Until I used the Photoshop color dropper to make a swatch, I kept making it a dirty dark red. In fact it was a really beautiful fuschia. All by itself it was a crazy pink purple, but in the context of the whole painting it reads as a dark red, which is just fascinating. 

The other color that was giving me a run for my money was the reflection of the sky. Initially it seemed like since the sun was setting, the window should reflect a yellow color as well. But since the sun is coming from behind, the window is reflecting the sky in the opposite direction of the views, which is the blue you find towards the top of the sky during a sunset. Even that blue kept on coming out more muddy - until I used the color picker again. This is a fantastic tool to have in the arsenal! I like to use it to get a truer idea of the color, and then I push or pull it in the way that I whichever way I want to empasize it. In the meantime, it gives me a great jumping off point.

Reflected Glow

"Reflected Glow"
7"x5" Oil on Gessoboard
$45 Unframed
Click Here to Purchase

This painting is of one of the first nights I got into New York. I was wandering around the Times Square area, and I saw the sun setting behind the buildings. The sky was neat - it always is at sunset, right? But more so than the sky, I was really intrigued by the way the sky was kind of reflecting off of the cars and the street. It was just glowing, more so than the bright lights of the theaters on Broadway. Kind of crazy, isn't it?

Also, I thought I would end the week with another crazy Asia story. So I'm painting this morning, and I go into the kitchen to make my lunch. The kitchen is flooded, and there's water dripping out of the ceiling. Well, that's a bad sign. I was thinking broken pipe and worried about damage to the apartment.

So I call the owner's handyman. He is like, "No, no. You must call the aircon people, it is not my problem." This is a pretty typical scenario here. You ask anyone to take responsibility and solve a problem and their first response is "No, cannot lahhh." But to be fair, the last time I checked, you rarely get water pouring out of the ceiling because of the airconditioner. That usually means plumbing.

In any case, I'm telling him there is no way this is the aircon. It is on the other side of the house from the aircon. He doesn't believe me. Tells me to call the aircon people again. Back and forth, back and forth. Finally, I convince him that I'm not just some nervous nelly and complaining about the doorknob not working (that's another story - the day the doorknob quit working and fell off, thereby trapping me inside the apartment until my husband came home. Oh, by the way, this is when I didn't have a cell phone either.) Anyways, so he comes over, takes one look in the kitchen, and is like "Ohhh, that is a leak. Very bad. I look."

Sigh. Long story short, hopefully we will have a new hot water heater soon. :)