This week i’ve been trying to get the building proportions in better proportion. As usual, this has turned out to be more of a challenge than anticipated. Also worked on water and icebergs floating in water. I think i’ll take a short break from working more on the building and refine the rocks. They (rocks) will need to be in their best shape before i try — if i do! — to paint some little penguins on them — the rocks.

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I realized pretty quickly after my first post of this painting that it was highly unlikely that i would be able to capture the ice background in a way that would allow the viewer to see it as the wall of ice it is and not some distorted sky. So i revised the composition a little and just made that ice into snow/ice- covered mountains (which are, in fact, everywhere in the Antarctic) and add in some sky at the top of the painting. That seemed to help some. Otherwise i’ve worked on all the different areas. It’s pretty tricky to try to delineate icebergs and ice covered landscape when all around is snow and ice. Clearly a good learning experience.

We are now settled happily into our new house, and i have just begun painting in my new studio. I did a little drawing while i was in the process of unpacking all my painting supplies, and had a little time to think about what to paint. At the point i realized i needed to get started on something, i decided on a photo taken on our trip to Antarctica last December. One of the stops was at Port Lockroy, a British historical base which featured the most southern post office in the world. This was the only “commercial” place we saw on the trip. As i am always attracted to old buildings, i loved this one. The contrasting colors of the buildings with all the surrounding ice, will be a challenge. What you see at the top half of the photo is all ice — NOT sky.—we were in a caldera, so surrounded by ice. The bare white parts are land, but i need to figure out a way to present that so it doesn’t look like low sky. I don’t know if the way the reference photo looks is an artifact of what the camera did, or not. I may have to change all that significantly. To be determined.

The painting is just getting beyond the blocking -in phase, so no details for a while yet. Multiple layers required to get the feel of the ice and no doubt the rocks, as well. So no penguins till close to the end!