Michelle Cote Fontaine Fine Art

I saw a photo on my daughter’s cell phone and mentioned that it was a “paintable piece”.  She told me that her boyfriend had recently taken the photo and that’s when this became a painting!  I have never thought that I would be able to accurately recreate buildings and, as a result, I have stayed as far away from them as I could possibly get.   However, since I began painting again, my attitude has changed and I am now of the opinion that if I try something, I may fail.. but if I never try it, then I will surely fail.  And so I took on this reference in a big (16×20) way.  The start of the painting addressed my deepest fears: to sketch out the buildings.  This is the most critical part because once the structures are in place the rest becomes, in my mind, a paint by numbers project.  After taking great care to sketch the buildings in place, I started to block in the building colors that came out of my printer.  Once I got all of the colors on the canvas, I realized that my printed reference was in the brown tones and my phone reference was in the black/grey tones.  At that point, I used the tiny screen of my cell phone as my color reference to paint this painting.  The color pallet for this was fairly simple:  Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Blue, Ivory Black, White, and a teeny tiny splash of my favorite color Red in the street sign.