1952 HUDSON HORNET

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I took a while to decide how to paint this image. The final decision was to crop the photo so as to emphasize the headlight and grill. The photo was taken on a cloudy day so I had to pump up the reflections on the chrome and the light off the car's body.

This painting took about 20 hours. I started one version and discarded it after about 3 hours of drawing and painting. I'm glad I did as I didn't like the color. The second one was cropped even tighter that the first and I changed the color from maroon to dark blue.

The photo had a reflection of a '55 Chevy on the side of the Hudson. I tried painting that, but it looked more like the Chevy was painted on the side of the car than it was a reflection.

I did up to 7 or 8 layers of indigo to get the dark reflective blue. The same was true in some places on the dark colors on the chrome. The darker I made them, as they contrasted with the bright white and light blue, the better it looked.

NEWPORT SISTERS

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I have ambivalent feelings about this painting. There are things I like about it, but there are also things I didn't get right. The perspective on the dock is off, the background seems a bit too busy and the water to the left in the foreground appears to me to have too much contrast. This is sort of like the kid puzzle where they are asked to "Find six things wrong with this picture".

Having said that, it is an improvement over the first boat painting I did last year where the water looked like Jell-o and the boats looked like they were floating downhill. I like the white on the boats and especially the reflections in the water.

I took this picture in Newport, Oregon, this summer. The couple working on the boat on the right was selling crab and tuna right off the boat.