Venetian Canal

In wanting to improve my skills in creating environments, I decided to recreate this scene from a photo that I took while on a recent trip to Venice, Italy. I had originally began the piece yesterday by trying to block in shapes first then fine tune the details later, but what I discovered is that I would get too eager to start doing the detailed work in each area (and making sure my colors and lighting were correct) early on that I would end up wasting time focusing on small sections of the piece before making sure that the proportions of elements and the overall composition were accurate. I decided to start again today with a new approach. I would do a line drawing of the whole scene, focusing on the overall composition, then I would clean up the line work and block in the colors, highlights, and shadows in layers behind the line drawing at the end.

This method worked best for me because it allowed me to lay out the whole picture first, without letting color distract me. I found that adding color and then highlights/shadows last allowed me do complete this project faster because I could more easily determine how the buildings and other elements in the piece would effect the light quality of each other.