Starting a new Painting - Castello Banfi

My next larger effort will be a 16" by 20" acrylic landscape based on a photo of Castello Banfi in Italy. This is a beautiful hilltop winery in Montalcino, in the Brunello region of Tuscany. Amazing pictures from all angles are easy to find.

First step is to sketch in the basic layout of the painting, and then to put in a basic sky. This is too monotone at the moment, but it will get some additional detail.

Sketch and Sky

The second step was to block in the building colors of brightly lit, shadowed and rooftops before the sketch detail of this got lost under the paint. It did occur to me after painting to the point covered by these pictures that I didn't spray the under-sketch with a workable fixative prior to painting. It will be interesting to see how much graphite bleed-through I end up seeing. (I wonder if I could spray it now without harming anything...)

Blocking in Hilltop Buildings

Close up of the color-blocked buildings.

Color blocking the buildings

The third stage is to do the first stage of underpainting, blocking in some of the ground colors.

Rough color blocking

I tend to look at this and say "blech", but I need to keep reminding myself what most art tutorials on YouTube are telling me - most paintings will look bad most of the way through the process until they start to come together near the end. That's an encouraging thought.

I would estimate that I am no more than 10-20% done this one. Probably closer to 10%.