This week our subject is still the Chicago skyline, but unlike last week, it’s not even trying to be realistic. I wanted to do something with a more cartoony, subtly surrealistic aspect to it.
I did use a photo for reference, but instead of gridding it out, I roughed it out in pencil on illustration board, making judicious use of a new set of flexible curves I just got, so that I could distort the image before painting over it.
The exaggeration was to try to convey how small the buildings in question make you feel. This is a view of the Chicago Skyline, looking North from our hotel in the River North district. It’s a big skyline, so there’s a lot you can do with it.
After doing the pencil rough, I painted over it mostly with acrylics, but I used some Winsor Newton inks on the sky. I tried to employ some Hopperesque shadow techniques without going for the stark realism of many of his paintings.
The plan is to eventually recreate this as a larger scale canvas, but when I do I’ll probably change the color of the skyscraper on the far left to something less realistic, but more of a contrast with the sky. I like the artificial height (it’s not the tallest building here, but it looks it from this angle), but it gets lost in the sky.
To see it bigger try clicking HERE. Chances are, if you look at it on a computer screen, you’re probably seeing it larger than it was painted.
Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM an also recent edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis. You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.
Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM, and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM.
At 8 PM you can hear Lenny Bruce on an encore of a recent episode of The Comedy Vault.
Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of covers of songs by The Fab Four on Beatles Blast (with one crossover episode of Psychedelic Shack thrown in near the end).
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