Progress: Fish Factory 3

Underpainting the sunlit areas.

I'm using that sort-of Cape Cod method of painting my shadows in blues and purples, and the sunlit areas in yellows and oranges. As always, I have some problem distinguishing between temperature and value - like, the side of that metal chute is in the sun, but it's quite a dark color. Do I make it yellow or purple?

This is (probably) the final underpainting. I let the previous version sit overnight and then made some corrections and put a value on those super-neutral areas. I'm glad I did that value study, because I referred back to it several times when I couldn't decide just how light/dark any given area should be. There's millions of colors and shades in my reference photo; just five in the value study.

This second photo is washed out from the sunlight hitting it; it comes in pretty strong through my studio windows in the morning.

Except for the metal chutes, I'm pretty close to where I want to be. In a Carol Marine tutorial, she says that the most interesting paintings are those with a dominant value, a secondary, and then a smidge. In my mind, the dominant value in this scene are the mid-tones. But the light and dark tones are pretty evenly divided; I will have to make a decision about which to minimize or maximize.