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11PM, Aerin, 2020.

24"x30", acrylic on canvas.

eleven pm.png

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This painting was inspired by a walk I went on near my house, and the color scheme was inspired by photographs I took in my neighborhood. This photo shows the color scheme pretty well. Something about a residential area seems to turn the sky purple more often than other city areas. 

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I notice that residential areas seem to have more of the green streetlights, and non residential areas tend to have more orange streetlights. Green and purple go so well together, I found myself wanting to always use them in combination. 

A photograph of a residential street with trees on the side of the road. The sky and the snow on the ground are both a desaturated pinkish purple. In the center of the image there is a streetlight shining green light.
A pen sketch in a sketchbook. The image is shaded with hatch marks. The image depicts a residential street with houses flanking the road. In the center there is a streetlight.
Pen sketches in a sketchbook, with digital coloring on top. The left one shows a carved road and sidewalk with a line of trees behind them. Behind the trees is the sihouette of a building. The sky is blue and the trees are grey. There are two streetlights shining orange light onto the sidewalk. The righthand image is shaded with hatch marks. The image depicts a residential street with houses flanking the road. In the center there is a streetlight. The image has a purple sky and the streetlight shines green.

When making this thumbnail, I was also considering a different composition. I chose the composition for 11PM because I felt like the other one was too similar to other paintings I had made. Already, all these paintings are very similar and I needed to be sure I was giving them enough of their own features to make them stand out. At various parts of making this collection I seriously considered picking something else because I wasn't sure how many different streetlight pictures I could possibly come up with. Luckily, every time I felt like I was totally stuck, going on a walk or a drive would bring new inspiration to me. 

One of the problems I ran into while making these was the limitations of a camera. All of these paintings have extremely high contrast, which is no problem for the human eye. However, cameras find it significantly more difficult to balance the lights and darks, as is obvious in this in progress picture. Most cameras will default to over exposing pictures of my paintings. For a while I couldn't figure out how to fix it, and I would just accept that my phone couldn't do them justice. A couple paintings after this one, I figured out that I could use my hand to rebalance the exposure. It made the images much darker and made the colors more rich. 

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An unfinished painting. The painting is unshaded. There is a purple sky over a dark residential street. The houses next to the street are black silhouettes, with a few having orange windows. There is a streetlight in the center of the image.
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