How's the Water?

It was back to class last night after a couple weeks off, and I finished up my penguin picture. I was not totally happy with my progress when I posted it last time, but a number of minor modifications made me feel better about it, and this is the finished deal. As usual it's on 9x12 Art Spectrum paper.

But since I still had plenty of class time left I needed to start a new painting, but I was prepared for that and even knew what I wanted to paint. The other day I was hanging out on the street corner waiting for a bus home, and I thought the scene with rush-hour traffic and city lights looked pretty cool. My new HTC Hero cellphone has a 5 megapixel camera built in, so I took it out and snapped a shot. I was pretty happy with how the shot turned out, so I decided I wanted to try to paint the scene.

This is a bit bigger than most of my paintings have been - a 12x16 size instead of 9x12 - and a bit more intricate, so may take me longer than my usual 1 classday to complete. :-) But I got a good start on it, so am showing a preview below of how far I have gotten so far.