Some practice I did before I started oil portraits

I used to drive by this place every week going to my daughter's dance class at a girls boarding school in the area. It was so cool looking I had to pull over and take photos one day. The red and green is gorgeous in person. Will post my reference pic

I did this recently from a photo I thought was cool. I found out afterwards it was from midjourney, my bad.

I wasn't fully successful but I tried to capture that citrus glow you see when light shines through it right. I'll post the photo too, I love how the photo of my setup came out and it's my phone backgrounds now

A recent painting. I tried broken color around the moonlight, going for an ethereal feeling.

I finished this up today. Super fun project. I didn't start with a line drawing. I started with charcoal powder and a brush to get the massing in. Then I had to dump off all the powder and spend 15 minutes erasing, lol. Then moved to vine charcoal to start the shapes. And used charcoal pencils to finish up. The background is pastels - he just seemed too cheerful to stay all black and white. I was originally going to do a translucent blue but my gut said yellow and wow were these pastels vibrant.