Project 7: Townscape with Buildings and Figures

Now the Studies have been completed its time for the Final Design.

I have really enjoyed doing the studies in Oil Paints; I have really loved using them and find them a really exciting medium to use once you get the hang of working wet on wet all the time. I have a lot to learn about Oil Paints before I would use them for big paintings not only that but I wouldn’t have enough time for the medium to dry if I did it in oils? I didn’t realise how different it would be painting in Oil Paints I have found them totally different to acrylic paints, you need to develop another set of skills to use them correctly. I feel that now I have actually used oil paints I could get addicted to this medium very easily.

Choosing the canvas size and medium for the Final Design.

I have chosen to use a A1 canvas board, this is the largest size I have in stock I would like to use bigger but to my knowledge nobody makes them any larger. I don’t like using canvas as every time I buy one it seems to have dents in the and sometimes I can’t get the dints out. The first thing I will do is to transfer the image to a larger canvas by gridding; because the ratio of the A1 canvas board is slightly different I will have to add more of the building at the top rather than stretching the image to fit the canvas. I’ve decided to carry on with the same image for the final design that I have used in the studies, I’m not sure if I will change anything about the composition or add anything to the design yet.

DON'T FORGET TO CLICK THE IMAGES AGAIN ONCE THEY HAVE LOADED FOR A LARGER IMAGE...

I started off with gridding a black and white print out of the image I wanted to transfer to the canvas panel for the final design. I wouldn’t normally use a grid just freehand it but I needed to get the main perspective correct to start off with. Once the main lines were in place I could do what I wanted and change whatever I decided to do as long as everything was going in the correct direction.

The windows were really hard to do and they took ages to get looking okay. I wanted to show more of the windows then what were shown on the source photograph. It must have taken a day just to get the windows correct at the end I was fed up with the bloody thing. Other details from the Debenhams building were also added. 

Debenhams has a large dominate clock that is on the building I wanted to show it even though it was just out of sight on the photograph. I had a little extra space to play with on top of the building due to the ration but I had to lower the clock by one row of the windows to fit into the picture.

The buildings in the background looked quite boring so I looked at another photograph which shows a slightly different angle. These buildings are just a little bit further back on my original photograph but I decided to bring them forward a bit. As you can see from this photograph the buildings are actually there and I’m not just putting any building there I have just moved them forward a touch. I felt that the Arndale building itself was an important historic building and now everyone for sure knows we are in Manchester because of this building.

The largest building is the Arndale centre which is an important building before the arnadale and the closed of shopping area it use to be a busy main road.

On the original photograph the cable runner is placed at the back of the tram. However I looked at loads of photographs that I took and a lot of them also had them at the front, I supposed it depends on which way the tram is going, is there a drivers part at both ends of the tram?

The original photography had only a couple of letters from the shop sign but I wanted to show the shops full name. I looked at the shop sign and draw a serif font. Shop dummies were also added; these are from Debenhams display windows but were taken from images I found off the internet.

The tram doesn’t go straight it actually comes from round the corner, I’m not 100% happy with it at the moment might have to have another look at it. On the original photograph I thought the tram went straight and not round the corner as there were two figures in the way.