The red boxes show where the subsequent details are on the painting “Burrard Crossing”. The painting is pretty big; 28 by 45 inches so there is a lot going on up close.
Starting from the largest areas and moving in to the smallest details, here is the left (South) abutment of Burrard Bridge:
Two views of the water reflecting the “Up-lights” that illuminate the piers under the bridge. In the earlier stages of the painting there were no lights on the Southern pier. I went to investigate and found that the lights had burned out and haven’t been repaired for some time. I went back to the studio and painted them in as I imagined them to be when lit. (See my post about Artistic License).
There is a great deal of painting in the small space under the Bridge :
The setting sun is lighting up the windows in a West End apartment building near Stanley Park and the tops of the masts also catch its last, dying rays.
And even closer everything is bathed in a warm light:
I enjoyed painting the ‘little eyes’ of the car headlights peering out of the gloom.
I just discovered, while talking with one of the captains of these small, aquatic vessels, that the navigation lights on theses boats aren’t visible from behind. I had to paint the mysterious green glow of these lights in any case. Viridian Green glazed over one of those blobs of white I talked about earlier. The surrounding space is tempered with the same green hue.
Speaking of artistic license, the boat that is about to leave the dock on the far side is actually the same boat that is pulling away from us. I liked the idea of the back and forth urgency of these little craft. This one is in competition with itself. There is, in reality, only one boat at a time that does this run.
I can’t leave out the North Abutment of the bridge:
Last, but not least, the few brushstrokes that shows the lights at the South end of the bridge ready to light up the sky in the Sun’s absence:
Next time I’ll show how I stretched the painting and applied a retouch varnish.
Graham Bretton Bibby's Blog 
