Why I like painting

Painting is such an art of abstraction. This is from last night looking north east at the Brendwood mall sky station. I especially like plein air painting because the nature of it, it is usually done in a short period of time due to changing lighting conditions and weather and the scale tends to be smaller. This also steers the artists to be more loose, to just capture the essence. The resulting image is often a more abstract interpretation..
This painting is mostly made of dots and smaller shapes. Since the view was so dark, I couldn't really see the shapes of the buildings well, all I could do was to try to paint how the lights fall and reveal them. This resulted in many shapes of colours that ultimately form a recognizable image.
This is actually how I like to approach painting. Instead of seeing a tree as a tree, a building as a building, I like to just focus on the basics of it, the shapes, value, hue, saturation... Once you complete these shapes with the proper colours, the whole image will come together giving that the composition is solid.
In painting, I could rearrange placements and exaggerate colours as well. In this view, that big tall street light was in the middle of the frame, I moved it a little to the left. The sky was a subtle purple, I used a more saturated purple to complement the warm night scape.

2013 11 02 - 6.5" x 8.5"  "Brentwood station under a purple sky"

Below is a photo of the view.As you can see there's not much details left, and it's a pretty unappealing image. But it's not to say photographs (especially snap shots) are useless for painting. In can be a really helpful aid if you know what information you need out of it.

I took the photo and processed it on the computer. Since I shot RAW, there's a lot of information in the pixels that I could bring back. Below is the processed image, I lifted the blacks, and brought down the high lights, and increased the exposure. Overall, I took the steps to make it more close to how my eyes saw the scene, and the processed image looks a lot closer to what I painted, it also has a much more painterly feel.

In this painting, I didn't use the photo to paint, but if I were to make a larger studio piece of this painting, I would use this photo to get a much more accurate drawing and details, and use my painting for color and value reference.