Bottles in Bangkok, Revisiting an Oil Painting from the Past

I started this work during my first semester of grad school in 2009. I had gotten into the MFA program with a series of fairly realistic paintings about my experiences living in Japan. I knew I was interested in the stories behind my experiences, but I couldn't quite verbalize or justify why I wanted to paint this at the time. Because of that, despite what I now see as plenty of potential in many of the works I started, I abandoned the project. That said, by moving forward to new projects, I discovered digital art and I've never looked backwards!

Meanwhile, this painting had been sitting around gathering dust for over 5 years, and I decided it was finally time to finish it! The painting is based off of an encounter with a bottle vendor in Bangkok. I was visiting Bangkok with my roommate while I lived in Japan. We took a lot of tours while we were there - but they were all unfortunately in Japanese so I have no idea what they were telling us!

After leaving a gorgeous temple on a dreary rainy day, I saw a woman slouched on the side of the road on top of her water cart. I fell in love with the image! There was something so melancholy about her semi-reposed figure in contrast with the blue bottles that she was selling - I knew it had to be painted!

Here is what it originally looked like before I started my renewed attack. I liked the mood of the painting, and digging into my memory, I remember thinking that I wanted it to be mostly black and white with the water bottles standing out in blue. I also knew that I wanted to keep the "drippy" background - to imply rain without actually painting it.

Original painting

Before I started reworking it, I wanted to check it's accuracy - I usually use Photoshop to help with this. I took a pic of the painting, then opened a file with my painting on the bottom layer, the reference photo on top, and then I used my drawing tablet to make an accurate trace of the figure based on the photo.  

Photo with linear overlay

I then turned the photo "off" so that I could see my line work on top of my painting. I assessed where my painting was off and using Photoshop to guide me, I set about correcting my errors and deepening my values. Though I have to say, I didn't have a whole lot to fix in terms of placement!

Painting with linear overlay

Here is my initial "repaint." The water bottles definitely still needed some work, and I also wanted to emphasis the rainy quality, so next I focused mainly on those two areas. After adding more detail and deeper blues to the bottles, it seemed like I needed to add a tint of blue in other areas of the painting to tie it in. To finish it off, I added some radiating circles to imply the raindrops hitting the ground and added a touch of blue to unify the painting.

Corrected Proportions

Working with a limited palette was a great exercise - it really helped me focus on accuracy and value. I hope you enjoyed learning about my process and seeing my artwork. Here is the final product!

Bottles in Bangkok, oil on canvas, 24" x 36"