Underpainting

In this painting, I began with an abstract underpainting of cool blues ---cobalt turquoise, thalo blue, and ultramarine blue--and cobalt violet to give some warmth to the painting.  Then I went back with darker values of the same colors to add some buildings and signs.  Finally, I left a trail of dark accents.

I think you can see that the preserved whites left after the initial underpainting all point to the busy focal points of the design.  Intuition played a large part in placing the buildings and signs.

Early this week I kept getting into trouble because I was trying to include too many colors and none of them clearly dominated the paper.  When you have too many warm colors to choose from, the temptation is to put them all in.  To get out of that problem, I decided to stay strictly on the cooler side of the palette this time.