Bucket list; paint a winter holiday town scene

Every artist has a bucket list of things & places we “want to try to draw that someday” . Sometimes it's a style of art we want to mimick, maybe a new type of medium entirely.

Something I’ve always wanted to try my hand at, was a winter holiday town scene. The kind of warm illustration that you see on many greeting cards, I haven't been inspired to do one until this year.

The initial start. I needed to block out the buildings with colors and shapes.

I am always painting the spots that interest me or scare me, first. I like to dive right in and conquer the nervousness so I can enjoy the rest of the drawing experience. I don't want to spend hours on something only to freeze up trying to do the hardest part last.

I knew the Northern Lights would be an issue, I've made several attempts at drawing them and have never been fully happy. Until I saw Bob Ross's tutorial on how to paint the Northern Lights. He was able to explain and show me how, and I'm so thrilled with the results.

This is a digitized vision plan. I took the photo of my painting and I stared at it while I took a break and ate lunch. And through staring at the photo of my painting, I figured out that the Northern Lights were too long.

The problem with art is that it takes a lot of effort to see the issues, some are not as obvious as others. And sometimes what you think is the issue, isn’t the visual problem of the painting.

I like to use the markup tool in my photo editor program. I get to test ideas out digitally on my painting, before I commit to the bit on the physical canvas. With the markup tool, I was able to test different lengths of the Northern Lights.to determine which was the one that resonated with my vision. I also wanted to paint snowflakes, and debated adding xmas lights to a couple of houses. They turned out great in this digitized version, so I went ahead with it on the real canvas.

The inflatable Darth Vader is a cheeky inside thing for the family who recieved this. I love how things are shaping up at this point. The easy part comes next, finalizing the details.

And it's done.

Fyi, this was a recycled canvas. It had been damaged at the warehouse, hence the trampled wood frame. I could have taken the canvas off and given it a new frame but I feel this gives it more character. Nothing was wasted. If I had given it a new wooden frame, the mangled former wood frame would have gone to the bin.

It's character! Embrace the character.