Commercial Project: Glasgow Tram

 

I’ve been back at work since Tuesday. I’m an English teacher in a local comprehensive – 11-16 school. So time has been at something of a premium. I promised myself, though, that I was going to try to make another picture to sell. I thought it might be an interesting post to take you through my process again.

 The last picture I sold a couple of days ago was my ink and watercolour picture of a Glasgow tram in the National Tramways Museum. So I decided to go for a Glasgow tram again, but this time, a Glasgow tram on the streets of Glasgow. Every picture I’ve ever made of Glasgow trams has sold, so it’s a little bit of a no-brainer.

 I got caught up in what I was doing and forgot to take any photographs until I was about half an hour into it, so there’s already a lot done in this first picture. The plan was to complete the sketch last night, scan it, and then apply the paint today. I started this one with the tram, and then started on the buildings to the immediate right.

 

I felt happier once I reached this point, since those buildings just peeping out behind the tram do at least tie it into the rest of the sketch.

This was the photo I took at the end of the evening, when the sketch was complete. It’s funny how one small detail can make such a difference, but prior to drawing in the car on the left, the whole picture looked terribly unbalanced. 

So this is the scan, which most clearly shows where I would have left the picture if I wasn’t going to add watercolour.

 

This was just before I started applying paint this morning. A couple of things to note. I used a board, and taped the picture to the board, This was to try to prevent the paper wrinkling. It’s only sketch book paper, 150g/m2, so it wasn’t really meant to be painted on, but this is one thing I can do which helps. The other thing is that the photo shows the most important aspect of my preparation before I start painting – a cup of coffee.

 

First for paint were the roadway surface, and the sky. The roadway is wet in the original reference, and I tried to get this across using base colours of blue, purple and grey, with yellow reflections in front of the tram. I wetted the appropriate areas before applying the paint, so that the colours would mingle into each other at the edges, then allowed them to pretty much dry before continuing.

 

Next I went for the brightest colours in the whole painting, the windows and the sign of the Woolworths store, and the green and orange of the tram. I was tempted to leave the picture like this, but I often have issues trying to decide just how far to go with a painting and when to stop and leave it as it is.

 

Purple, brown and blue, in different amounts of each, were what I used for the rather drab background buildings. The Woolworths store was completed with a creamy brown mixture, with highlighted bricks in browny purple.

That’s where I left it. Once dry, I scanned it, and you can see the scan below. The only problem with scanning is that I find it isn’t true to the colours. The photograph gives a better idea, but even that isn’t quite true to how it actually looks. Still, it’s now on sale, all for an outlay of 3 hours’ work last night, and another hour this morning.