Dog Fight at Greywacke Arch, Central Park

Today was another good day to paint, so I woke up early and went back to Central Park, this time behind The Met.  I chose the location last night.  The arches are kinda fun and also very challenging to paint.

I got into the park around 9:30 and started painting around 10.

While I was setting up some dogs got into a fight and I thought that would be a cool thing to add into the painting.

Here's the under-drawing, I remembered to get a picture mostly in time.

This was a hard scene to decipher because of the light and so much green. 

When I started, a lot of the values were so close together. 

Everything kind of ran together. It made me think of that Marshall Jones class where I couldn't make out the model's face right in front of me because of the light, and Marshall couldn't either.

Greywacke Arch was kind of like that, too.

I didn't even realize until the light had changed enough an hour later that that grey thing on the far left is a tree trunk, not part of the bridge.

I reached a midway point where I thought this painting was going to be a failure.  I had added people along the top and also faked the iron fence part (bad idea). The people were in-scale relative to real life but were quite large and distracting.  This is a smallish arch and the top of the rail is about waist-high.

It didn't look good. It bothered me.

So I scrubbed the whole rail area out and used my phone to zoom in to see the pattern on the rail.

That's a tough thing to get properly; it's ornate.

But the painting was doing a lot better without the people.

Here is the painting before I added in the dog fight.

I guess it's ok enough, but it needs a little something more.

By this time I was pretty tired and ... almost... called it done, but I knew I would regret it.

Putting in the dog fight took 20 minutes, definitely worthwhile.

8x10 oil