I visited New Orleans over New Year’s weekend to see the view from the levee at the foot of Deslonde in Holy Cross. It was wonderful. I did some oil sketches and took some photos and a video as barges turned downriver from the Industrial Canal. Back home, I used one of the images and the sketches to do a black and white undercoat of the scene. It has two roll on-roll off (“ro-ro”) vessels on the wharf upriver from the entrance and a swing hanging from the channel marker. The stern of those ro-ros look like a massive steel cubist collage.
The next move was to import the picture above into Paper so that I could try an idea out I had - to thin out the paint with medium and tint this drawing with colors and let the tones beneath show through and provide the shading. This was a very easy way to test out the idea and it worked.
I used acrylic medium and followed this color scheme pretty closely and got largely what I wanted. I didn’t quite get that silvery grey green for the levee but that’s OK. I am happy with how this turned out. About eight hours from start to finish. (to be continued…)
Well, not quite. I lost the thread of the experiment on the levee, painting over and over it until you couldn’t see the underlying drawing. So I started over. I gessoed the bottom part, redrew the levee bank and path in black and white and stuck to using color in thinned out form as a tint rather than as an opaque “icing.”
I also developed the sterns of the ro-ros and the adjacent wharf, took out the swinging child (“Just because something is there doesn’t mean you have to include it,” reminded C), and improved details of the tugboat and stern of the barge. Now, perhaps, it’s finally done.
