Art Process (continued)

I am at a stopping point now where I need to think about the painting more before I decide what I should do next. I probably need to lighten some areas, darken others to make the instruments stand out a bit. I think I will leave out the maracas and castanets from my original plan. There is enough going on here.

Here are some of the steps along the way.

Starting out I took my underpainting (burnt sienna) and put it up on the easel with my shapes sketch and the piano music.  I tried to keep some rhythm and sense of movement with the curving lines. I took a good look at my actual piano and studied the keys a little before I painted them.

I started putting in the guitar shape and realized that the raw sienna/yellow ochre mixture was not opaque enough to cover the piano keys. I added more layers mixed with titanium white.

I brought Joe's drum into my studio and used that as a model for the drum on the left (djembe). The others came out of my imagination and memory. I decided I needed more color and mixed some phthalo blue (green shade) with white and a little yellow ochre for the drums.  I added some more detail to the guitar.

I added the saxophone and clarinet, using images from the internet and manipulating them a bit. I changed them around a little from my original sketch.  I felt that I needed more color and did some splashing and brushing. The top photo shows that I darkened the background on the painting and that I wrote the words (using a calligraphy pen) from the sheet music. I enjoyed the process, but still prefer to paint landscapes. This has been a good challenge and, as I mentioned above, I'll probably make some more changes to the painting.