The Toulousian Painting.

I sneak in a mirror reflected reference photo.

While we were in Toulouse we ducked into a nice little salon de thé that to me felt like something out of a 1940s representation of Europeans in Africa. Probably just the French dealing with the heat of the south. While at this place I noticed a girl sitting alone at one of the tables reading on her phone. Perhaps surfing the internet, perhaps reading a book, I couldn't quite tell as it was in Asian characters. I would guess that it was either Chinese or Japanese. In such a beautifully intriguing place I found it to be somewhat odd that she would pass the time ignoring her surrounding to immerse herself in her phone.
I remember they also had nice restrooms.
The girl then left and we stayed a bit longer sipping on our drinks, which if I remember right were not actually tea but something cool to counter the heat of Toulouse. Taking a breather in the hectic nature of our vacation. It was one of those towns where I wish we had had more time in order to explore it. We were not actually staying in the town but in Muret which was a train ride outside. So every moment we had to spend in the city was spent trying to run around and see everything as well as taking it slowly to see how the locals live.

Which brings me to now. In making a series of paintings based on my travels in France and things that I had the pleasure of seeing I have made it to this point. Restricted to the size of the antique frames I brought back from France I decided to zoom up on the girl with her digital device. The edges will still be cut more as I cut the paper to fit the frame. Again the critiques in painting class are wanting to pull me away from the outlining of everything. I have been hoping that the addition of more stippling would help this problem. Using ink that isn't black would also be nice to try out, but I don't like the idea of preparing my pens with colored ink just to clean them out again.

At the moment I am feeling a bit stuck in trying to think of what to do with the background and the mirror. For the mirror I was thinking about using tinfoil again to make it reflective but distorted enough that the viewer doesn't think of them-self as looking into a small doll house, but I am not feeling too certain about this idea as it might just be read as tinfoil. Then for the walls I was hoping to keep the boring stark whiteness, but perhaps pulling in some graphite to add shadow. And then there are the stairs...

Another aspect of the critique was pushing me to do more in a less precise format within the painting. Something like tie dye walls was how I was reading it, but perhaps I can apply this to the staircase area. That and the small hanging painting.

While working on this piece I have come to miss Bretagne more for the moisture in the air that allowed me to paint so much easier in watercolor. It only gets worse in the painting studio with the air conditioning constantly going.