Coffee shop study

After painting the Shawn Mooney inspired painting I noticed I struggled more than I thought I would at painting a nighttime scene lit by artificial light. Then I realised it's something I'd never really painted before. That helped to reminded me of how important studies can be to help learn a subject by looking at an image or location before attempting it in a concept, giving it a more believable look.

Knowing the subject I'm painting is really important especially with the loose style I like to use as the style can become muddied and too built up if alot of corrections are made by painting further into the image. This is a problem I faced when painting the two forest scenes I felt didn't work aswell.

When looking at the image of the coffee shop I made sure to really study it and not just copy what I see but to try understand why the image looks that way, as in why are the lights reflecting the way they do and what's the cause of the bounce light. Also paying attention to the amount of contrast the image has in comparison to scenes that would be naturally lit. The image seems a lot more dramatic in this scene than it would be if the same image was painted during the day time.

Doing this study really helped me to loosen up with my painting again. Something that I was losing gradually as I had gone so long without painting a study. It allowed me to think more about the brush strokes once again and to think of more inventive and faster ways to get details done through adjusting the brush presets. An example of this is when I had to paint the metal shutters on the image I didn't want to paint every single line and I didn't want it to stand out as much as it's not really a main focus. I solved this by taking a long brush and spreading the shape so that the brush repeated. I did this on a separate layer then locked it in order to paint the lighting on top of it. Once the lighting matched I collapsed the layer back down to one.