My friend Cris asked for a painting of New York City to put in her office. Her office is decorated in a largely black and white color scheme, so I tried to paint this in black and white. I decided to punch it up a bit with some yellow, as a tribute to the taxi�s in NYC.

My first attempt wasn�t what I had in mind. The composition is close to what I want, but the painting itself is not.

I started with a hazy, foggy sky, and a light value of the same color for the Empire State Bldg. That�s pretty much the only part I like.

As I painted the initial wash, I thought to myself, no wonder watercolorist enjoy painting city scapes so much… these are gorgeous, and pretty simple!

As I moved from the horizon to the foreground, I deepened the values, and added more details. By the time I got to the foreground I had crammed so many bits and bobs that I definitely had a �Junk Drawer� painting.

And that was BEFORE I painted the cars and people.

With all that detail, I added more noise and basically just destroyed any sense of cohesion that might have been there at first.

As I painted the cars, I tried to get the yellow cab color to mix and bleed on its own – that worked a little too well. I accidentally dropped a huge drop into the wet road, and I couldn�t pull it cleanly.

That caused me to consider painting over the whole road with yellow – SMH. What am I thinking?!

So, this was a failure. I posted it on Reddit and asked for feedback, and I got some really good suggestions:

1. Use Yellow and Purple for grey/black instead of UM Blue and Raw Umber. This will help get that yellow into the skyline.
2. Work on the lines – they aren�t straight enough, but they look like I�m trying to make them straight, and as a result they look sloppy, not stylized.
3. Define a focal point. Add the most details there, and fewer details everywhere else.
4. The smoke reads as just an unfinished diagonal line, it adds atmosphere, but doesn�t contribute as much as it distracts.
5. Try to paint this in a way I�ve never painted before.

So, I tried again…

Burp

The second attempt was better in some regards, and worse in others.

I like the road. I like the reflections. I like the lines in the crosswalk. I don�t like most of the masked areas. I don�t like the yellow on the right. I don�t like the figures. I don�t like the yellow signs. I don�t like the cars. I don�t like the figures.

On my next attempt, I�m going to try something I have never done before, I�m going to paint it with masking tape on the edges to define the lines well. I�ll also drop the yellow, maybe just one cab… I will sketch it roughly the same, and definitely reduce the amount of details pretty much everywhere.

I dislike both of these, I�m curious to see how it goes when I try again later tonight or tomorrow.