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2AM, Aerin, 2020.

24"x24", acrylic on canvas.

2AM

I did a couple thumbnails to decide how I was going to alter the photo. As you can see, in all my thumbnails, I still had the car in the foreground. The reason I eventually decided to move it was that I wanted the car to be obviously parked. I purposefully make my paintings devoid of humans and I thought having the car in the foreground would make it look like someone was driving it.

A photo of pen sketches in a sketchbook. There are five drawn boxes, they all feature a building at a slight angle to the viewer. Three of the boxes also feature a car, at slightly varying sizes and placements. One of the boxes is shaded with hatchmarks.

Digital studies have been such a useful tool for me, I use them primarily to quickly and easily decide what colors I want to use, like in this one where I tested out green lights and decided I liked orange better. Although I quite like using green with my pieces featuring purple skies, It didn't capture the mood as well as the orange lights did. 

A photo of an unfinished painting with a digital drawing on top of it. The painting has a purple sky and a tan building. In front of the building, there is a parking lot which has one car, a sign, and concrete curb stops in it. The painting is unshaded. The digital drawing adds green lines on top, which emulate where the lights are supposed to go.
A side by side comparison of a painted depiction of a silver four door car. In the first image, the car is mostly unshaded and has very small tired. The second image is very similar to the first but it is fully shaded and the tires are twice the size of the other one.

One of the hardest parts of painting the car was proportioning the wheels correctly. The left shows that at first I made them really small. Honestly, they could probably still be bigger on the right. For some reason, my brain just could not see the tires the correct size, haha. Other than that, the car looks really good and I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to pull off this perspective of the car. The red lights were also a challenge, as red is my least used color and I wasn't sure how to make the glow-y illusion. I went with using red for the light falling on the car, and I made the actual lights themselves orange to make them look brighter.

Download the image to see it in its highest quality!

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This painting was based off a photo, although I took quite a few artistic liberties. I loved the color scheme and I wanted to challenge myself to paint a car. Its much harder than it looks!

I was also quite interested in the wet and rainy look, although I ended up not doing that in my rendition. 

A photograph of a silver four door car with its brake lights on in a parking lot. It is night time, and a little rainy. Behind the car, there is a tan building with a line of yellow orange lights wrapping around it. The lights make lines of orange on the wet asphalt. The image is taken through a window, and there are water dops on the glass.
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