Santa Barbara Streetscene

Tried another streetscene. This time one in downtown Santa Barbara close to State street. The mountain ridge with all of the houses is an area known as the Riviera. Wasn't looking to paint that but it was my background and ads more to the depth of the painting.

12"x16" oil on Canvas

This one had more detail and took about 3 days to finish. Longer than the last but there was more to learn on this one. Here is a detail of the mountains. I like the way they came out, very subtle work there and I'm liking that more and more in my work.

I like keeping some degree of detail in the distant backgrounds but also staying very suggestive with it. Balancing suggestive and detail takes work. It looks easy but it took me a while to get them the way I wanted.

Here is another detail...

Keeping from painting too tight and too detailed on the cars is something I'm reminding myself as I paint. I painted that front van where it looked pretty straightedged but then went back in and loosened it up a bit.

I think the flags look pretty cool in this painting. I don't know why the city had them up but they looked cool. Tried to keep very lose on them. The hardest part of this painting was finding the right colors for the foreground street....shadows still mess with me. Anyway, I think it came out ok for only the second in street scenes that's I've done. They really are very different types of work. Lots of new things to figure out in doing these.