All the pieces are in place

Okay, all the pieces are now in place and I feel awful to think that it has taken me a month to get this far! From now on in it is tidying things up and making finishing touches. I have to say, it is a project that was much bigger than I thought and I should probably have chosen a larger canvas to give myself more space to work on thos details! The other option of course is to do it smaller so you just hint at the details. This is somewhere in between I guess. Oh well, I have to do some more work on it to get it finished. All in all, as a first attempt at a building I guess it is not as bad as I think it is. It is very frustrating but it is all a learning experience.

Mosque update

This is going really slowly. It is hard! It takes a lot of concentration and right now I can't work for long periods of time on it as my brain gets frazzled!!!

I have mostly been working on putting in the shadows, but there is so much detail and so many domes it is really hard work! I am just painting it - can you imagine what it was like to build.

I am using a very limited palette as usual. Cad red, cad yellow, burnt umber, cerulean blue and titanium white. I keep getting lost in the details, I should be more disciplined and get the main areas done first. Today I tried really hard to do that, but the details kept drawing me back. I guess I am in a hurry to finish! Don't know why.

New things for me

It is a long time since I have done any paintings with buildings or structures in them. For the past two or three years I have been mostly painting either dogs or horses, and that is becoming relatively easy for me now. I think the last time I did a painting of a building was when I was in primary school and the teacher made us study local architecture and took us on field trips to draw churches.

Well, perhaps I should have started again with something simpler, but every day I pass the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi when I am picking up the kids from school. I love the way the light reflects off it, and especially around 5pm at the onset of dusk.

This is a work in progress (wip) - oil on canvas 10" x 20"

At the moment it is in the very early stages. I started to block in the shadows, but then got carried away with the domes! I will finish blocking in the shadows of the walls before I do much more on the domes, but I just wanted to see if I could get the effect I was looking for. It is going in the right direction. There are some issues I have to deal with, but it is an extremely complicated structure and there are a lot of small domes, ledges and doors. This is a real challenge for me.