Here, in different stages, is the Brighton View Landscape painting I created for the Garden Home.

I made this rough sketch at the park before starting out. I was standing at the farther end of the enclosure of the Fort, so the view is more frontal than aerial, but when I did the painting, I shifted it so that the view would be more aerial.

When I started out, I figured I’d make the cannons a central image, and based it on a photo I had taken with the cannons close up and forward.

I should have gone with the preliminary sketch, which the clients really liked better, so I cleared out the large cannons and pulled out to get more of a bird’s eye view.

The first detail I completed was Beaconsfield House in the upper right hand corner.

Then, I did

the Lieutenant Governer’s Residence, Fanningbank,

which is visible between the trees from the park.

Next, I worked on the rocks around the shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in the Bay that leads to the Charlottetown Harbour, also visible from the park. I added the lamps and detailed them.

Then, I worked on the flower boxes and the planters. Each lamp had flowers at the base. I decided not to include the planters that were used during summer to divide the left lane in two so that there would be a bicycle lane, because it would make the road too crowded and the lanes too narrow.

Then I started on the new cannons, much smaller and placed in the bottom third of the painting, instead of in the bottom half.

       I changed the proportions a bit, so they look longer and thinner up close, but fit nicely in the bottom; I also changed some of the proportions of the fence so I could fit the cannons into the bottom third, so you get more of a view from up looking down.

After the cannons, I added more details to the boardwalk–worked on the park benches and a seated woman. Then, when my friends Veronika and her daughter Viola were with me painting as well, I added a jogger so Viola would have her mom in the painting!

The first time I did the lettering for Victoria Park in flowers, it was too upright, so I re-did that.

Then, I did the viewing platform, added plants and flowers to the lamp post bases…

This is the blurry shot of the viewing platform in the making, but clearer than the first one I took…

This is the clearest shot of the three I took of the viewing platform in progress…

Added plants and flowers to the bases of the lamp posts…

And one day, it was just done. I roughed up the water a little, broke up some of the rocks, then let it sit for a couple of days before spraying a finishing coat.

I let it sit again for a couple of days before I decided how to do the lettering in parchment with gold outlining.

Tried to get a diagonal shot to get the whole painting into my phone view with the biggest possible shot.

The whole painting is too large to take a close-up of, so I had to pull back halfway across the living room to take a full-width view. The actual shape is elliptical…

Not enough back-up room. Hehe. It gets cropped on one side.

… and this is what it would look like if it were cropped into a perfect oval shape (which just didn’t happen when Peter was cutting it up with his jigsaw. If the clients want to trim the corners, that’s perfectly all right with me, but I deliberately made a wider ellipse to get as much painting surface as possible.

The Brighton View Landscape can be viewed at the Garden Home, North River Road, Charlottetown, along with my mural of the old farmhouse. I need to take a photo of this with a real camera with proper lighting.