Venice at night

[scottmac]

MY IMAGE(S):



GENERAL INFORMATION:
Title: Venice at night
Year Created:
Medium: Acrylic
Surface: Canvas
Dimension: 60x40cm
Allow digital alterations?: Yes!

MY COMMENTS:
Hi, I've just joined Wetcanvas and this is the 1st painting I've uploaded - so please be gentle :-).
I'm just getting back into art (this is probably the 5th or 6th painting I have done after getting back into art).
It is "based" on a photo, but I have done around a 3rd of it from my imagination (taken the interesting bits from the photo and added bit's myself / changed the composition slightly)


MY QUESTIONS FOR THE GROUP:
I'd appreciate any comments/feedback - thanks

[Tom Brown]

Well you clearly know how to paint, and draw. I’m not sure if you were going for realism here or styleizing. If it’s the latter I don’t know what to say, it’s not my style but you did a lot of good work here, it’s just not for me. If it’s realism you were after then there are some perspective issues, particularly the Vaporetto Stop. The buildings are VERY brightly illuminated and Venice is a dark, lonely feeling sort of place at night. The perfectly flat cloud bottoms are distracting, I know it happens but they look odd. Again, I can see how much work you put into this and I felt that somebody should post a comment.

[~JMW~]

Without seeing the photo, what jumps out to me the most is how bright the water is compared to the sky.. the very bright buildings seem to not fit with night sky also.
Probably too bright even for a daylight scene..

Variation of colors/values, shading/shadows, and lines (hard & soft edges) are things to consider.

[La_]

ah, only with art can we so 'easily' build a city made of gold

la

[scottmac]

Hi, thanks for the comments and feedback. The painting did take me a few weeks working a couple of hours after work every other night or so - I was thinking I'd never get it finished at one point! :-) I do love painting light reflections on water

I suppose I was going for a stylised reality. My stylised flat bottomed clouds are just my thing, you're right that they're not very realistic (the night sky including the moon are not from the photo).

The source photo is more from dusk than my night sky - so I can see why the whole effect is a bit too bright (including the water). The source photo is also very bright as there is so much artificial light in that street/water scene at dusk/night - the buildings do appear very bright in the photo. Luckily, I completed the painting by adding a burnt umber wash to the buildings (more so with the bits way from artificial light) - it was even brighter before! :-)

Thanks again for the comments and feedback so far