Today is the day of the big wordpress makes me one of their favorite websites?! Gosh I wonder exactly where it will be. And exactly what it means. Anyway it’s exciting.

I just love the Fox Theatre. Love getting stopped at the light on Peachtree and Ponce so I can take pictures of it. If you have never been in it GO. RUN! It’s magical with its grandiose brass Moorish influences architecture. My Brain is tired from drawing and painting for hours today.

I also love the Atlanta skyline at night. It reminds me of Christmas trees lit up.

EEEKKKK!!!

Life did not go well. The reason there are two of them is the ink on the first one bled. No idea why. It’s my pilot desk pen that suppose to have permanent ink in it. It doesn’t. When I wet it with a base wash of quin gold it ran. I mopped it with paper towel. Painted some more and it kept running.

8×10″ For Sale. Also will be making prints and cards of these paintings. Email me if you are interested.

So I traced it off and transferred it with Sarah to another piece of paper. Then I inked it.

The first thing I did with this was to coat it lightly with quin gold. It makes the buildings glow. And it’s very transparent.

I used a lot of cobalt and Daniel Smith Piemonte in the shadows and to stripe the Fox. Piemonte’s a very transparent purple brown. Combined with cobalt it can be luscious.

The Fox is mostly quin gold though I got a little heavy with it so it went brown in places.

I combined indigo, alizarin, and hookers green to make a dark sky and coated it twice to make it opaque.

After I painted the sky black I realized that it should not have been black but the rest of the buildings should have been black and the sky lighter. Hoping to give the sky a glow and a ligher color I used  Andrews turquoise near the rooflines and mineral violet higher up. Since they are both semiopaque colors they did a good job lightening the sky.

You can see where I tested the turquoise and violet on the messed up one.

I used a bit of white gel pen to highlight things. Quin red and coral on the tail lights because they have a glow no other permanent red has.

NUMBER 2 also for sale once I finish the sky and the darn marquee.

This is the runny ink sketch. I think I need to work on the sky a bit more but ya my favorite. When something’s messed up you have a lot of freedom to just play and I did.

The whites are all white gouache because I had NO whites left which is sad for any watercolor I think. The whites make it sparkle. Reserve those whites Kids!! I dabbed it on the grey tail lights, on the stop lights the street lights, all over the Marquee, and the Fox sign. Really made it pop. Did I say LOVE it now.

I think I might actually repaint this in a large format.

No gel pen on this one at all.

Black tape. Discovered that when I took a class from Peggy Habits last spring. Love that stuff. You can buy it at staples or on amazon.

PSSSSS.…somehow when I was painting I managed to make the marquee not quite square…guess thats another fix when I fix the sky.

Anyway welcome to my corner of the world which seems to involve a lot of driving by the Fox which I DO love. I am just a star struck Fox Theatre fan.

Margaret xoxox who would like to welcome all my new followers…12 in the last hour!! :>