Cinque Terre, Italy

For this painting I wanted to use a different set of colours than I’ve been using lately.

More precise, I wanted to use some pastel colours.

A good place to start when it comes to buildings painted with pastel colours is Southern Europe.

I chose a scenery from Cinque Terre, Italy, showing a small, narrow street with buildings stacked tall against it.

It looked like this:

I know you can’t see the street in this photo, so I added it by memory.

I also decided that a pen would be best to use for the outline sketch, to get in those dark edges, clothing lines and balconies.

So I used about half an hour, and it ended up like this:

I imagined the sketch to be a little looser, so I was a bit disappointed about it.

This looks like a cartoon.

I should have used less edges, and let the buildings melt more together.

Anyway, I then did a wash:

Maybe a bit too bright in the choice of colours.

Now it looks more like a rainbow has puked over the paper.

But at least it’s a new set of colours for me to use.

Then came the final layer, and the whole thing ended up like this:

I like the green building on the right, and I really dislike the following three buildings.

They are simply overpainted.

The fensters are also painted a bit too dominating, but at least it looks better than it did after the first wash.

So, all in all, it was fun. Let’s focus on that 🙂

Now, on to the next!