Here is a painting which I did of the staircase in The Swan.
First of all I did a sketch of the staircase from the photograph, and then put the sketch onto the computer to allow me to ‘paint’ colours onto it without wrinkling the paper!
This was a very time-consuming process which I did on photoshop by using the fill tool, and but also had to reselect most of the different sections by drawing round them manually to prevent the colour from leaking into other parts of the picture. After I had completed it, I made several different versions by altering the colour saturation on the computer, and by using the photoshop ‘puppet warp’ tool to distort parts of the interior.
However, for this painting I decided to stick more to the original colours of the subject, to see what atmosphere this could create, before trying paintings in the style of my ‘computer paintings’.
First of all I painted the area behind the stairs in this picture with various colours, and yellow-ochre streaks that extended over the stairs to give the appearance of slight disintegration.
I also included variation of tone and linear aspects of the objects wthin the image, eg the beams.
However, when I showed the painting to a tutor they suggested that I took areas of pattern out eg on the stairs, and simplified my colours down into blocks to give the image more impact and focus.
They also suggested that I made the beams darker to contrast from the background.
And so I painted over the pattern on all of the stairs but one, as well as painting over the beams in black and painting over the area above the stairs in a solid block of orange.
While I think that this made the stairs more striking, I am not sure whether these changes helped with the ‘unreality’ aspects of the picture, or simply made it look more abstract. I also preferred the area above the stairs with the streaks before I painted over it.
One of the main ideas of simplifying the image was to isolate areas of pattern and therefore make them more significant. One area where I think this has been successful is the orange pattern on the beam on the right-hand side of the composition, which I have added to and outlined in black to make it more striking, while eliminating pattern in other areas of the image.
