Well, I’m a week late in posting Week 6’s Doodles, so it’s time to catch up!  The focus of the series of Doodles I did this week was a view of the Central Park Boating Lake with the skyline of Central Park South in the background.  I took the photo during a bike ride through Central Park on our trip to NYC in August, and it made it onto my list of pictures I’d like to recreate in my Paint My Vacation series.  

You will have noticed by now that both of the subjects I’ve chosen for Paint My Vacation have been from the same trip to NYC last year, but I do intend to branch out to another location for my next one.  

Before I share the individual areas I practiced during the week, here’s the picture I was trying to re-create:
 

It’s funny the things you notice in the background of vacation pictures after the fact, like this couple having wedding photos taken out on the rock in this sort of blurry, blown up section of the image above.  If you look really closely, you’ll see their photographer, too:

I’ve wondered before how many other people have captured me in the background of their vacation photos, and I hope I wasn’t doing anything too weird in them.
 

The technique I used on #3 at the bottom won!

I started out by practicing painting moving water.  There was algae in the lakes of Central Park when we were there, so I was working with greenish paint.  View on Instagram.

Today’s focus was painting the shadows into the water.  I don’t love this one, but then again it’s not the most exciting subject.  It got the job done, though.  View on Instagram.
 

I really like today’s practice painting of people in boats on the moving water, complete with little boat reflections.  In fact, I liked it so much I scanned it, printed out a smaller version of it, and put it in a teeny 3″x2″ frame in the office.  I even like it better than this section in the final version, especially the water, which turned out quite dark in the final painting.  View on Instagram.
 

I sketched out a small version of the skyline so I could try my hand at painting buildings, which is an area where I have little experience.  I simplified the skyline for my purposes but kept as many of the more unique buildings as I could.
 

I then erased the lines down to where I could barely see them so they wouldn’t show through on the finished painted image.

And I got to work painting!  I didn’t add much detail to the buildings beyond a little bit of shading and, of course, trying to match colors to the actual buildings.  My buildings are darker than the ones in the photo.  In the final version, I did a better job of making them a bit lighter, but I didn’t get the blue, hazy look quite right.  View on Instagram.
 

Today, I worked on rocks, trees, and water, but my main focus was the rocks since I’ve never painted them before.  With the exception of this video, which helped me with my rocks, I used only my own techniques this week.  View on Instagram.

Today, I outlined the final sketch and started painting a bit.  While I was working, a little ladybug came and joined me.  Like I said in my first doodle of the year, the little ladies find their way into the office and keep us company.  View on Instagram.
 

 

I get real worried when I see reflections of people when there are no people present to create reflections!

Eventually, those people came to life and are present on the finished version of the painting below:

I would like to learn to paint more detailed buildings in the future as these look a bit flat.  Overall, I’m pleased with the outcome, but I think I prefer the look I get when I don’t try to paint such realistic images, like the ones I did here.  

I got a little carried away with the shadows here:  the shadows of building on building are realistic and believable.  Including the shadows of the trees against the buildings, however, was going a little bit overboard.  There’s no way those trees are close enough to those buildings to cast shadows on them.  Furthermore, the sun would have to have been setting in order to be at the proper location to cast those shadows, and it wasn’t.  Also, since the sun moves east to west and I’m facing South as I take this photo…that would mean the sun would have to move from south to north to create those exact tree shadows.  Note to self:  be more accurate when creating shadows in the future!  View on Instagram.

And there you have it.  Now it’s back to work to catch up on some more doodling!

Doodle summary

This week’s Doodle total: 7
Yearly Doodle total: 45

Thanks for reading!