As I near the completion of the Sunset Grocery Building, I have started to kick around some other ideas for my next painting.  Some places I’ve already visited have given me lots of material like the Smelter Cemetery and the SPC Plant.  Those are pretty grand in scale and may result in some sort of a series. For my next painting I wanted to try something a little smaller in scale so I headed back downtown and scouted around.  Instead of wandering all over the place like I normally, do I focused on the Plaza Hotel and surrounding area.

There was some construction going inside, no doubt in preparation for making it usable again for some future tenants.  Personally, I would rather see the city use the Blue Flame building if they raze the current city hall to build a ballpark.  The Plaza would be better suited as a hotel given its proximity to the the Arts district.  Maybe it would force the Camino Real, that’s next door, to spruce up its aging property.

This part of downtown is my favorite. The majority of the buildings around here are older and part of the national historic registry.  There are some art deco-ish relics as well, namely the Kress Building and the American Furniture sign.

I’ve used this area before for inspiration, in the Plaza Monk and American Furniture paintings, so I guess I risk beating a dead horse.  There is something here though or I wouldn’t keep coming back. What to paint, what to paint…

Plaza Hotel on Flickr

Some more experimentation with HDR processing in Photoshop, with some tweaking in Lightroom.

For more: SPC in HDR on Flickr

Bonus shot of the day, HDR Panorama of the Franklin Mountains:

Click for a larger version

I thought I would try my hand at capturing some HDR shots of the Smelter Cemetery on El Paso’s westside.  This was a little different for me because I had to setup shots using a tripod. Normally I just shoot hand held.  To create a shot in HDR, the software requires at least 3 shots to sandwich into 1 picture the total high dynamic range.  These were the best ones:

Usually clouds vex me and are either blown out white or grey and nondescript.  There are 16 shots in total and they really capture the range of whites to dark greys in the clouds quite nicely.  The full set can be viewed here:

Smelter Cemetery in HDR on Flickr

I finished the brickwork and have started blocking in the base colors for the wood work.  Once the building colors are all blocked in I’ll start the detail and shadow work.  The last step will be the repeating pattern on the color band and this one will be wrapped up.

Sitting behind the Westside Recreation Center/Galatzen Park, on Wallenberg drive, is a large drainage basin formed by the earthen dam between Sunland Park Mall and I-10:

View Mesa Hills Wash in a larger map

I visited the area two times last year; once in harrowing adventure to get to the “Bridge to Nowhere” and the other in a vain attempt to find some interesting graffiti.

I went back to walk around the wash basin and kill some time at lunch.  The area is quite green despite the lack of rainfall.

Click image for a larger view

Parallel to a walking path that rings the area is an arroyo fed by the termination of a large drainage ditch that snakes through the westside. Its all downhill and by the time water reaches this area it can very forceful as evidenced in the great flood of 06, washing out part of Mesa Hills.

I didn’t notice it before but there is a mini canyon in the arroyo that looks like it holds water year round:

I saw quite a few birds around as well as a fox, who darted into his den on the side wall of the canyon. It might be a good area to do some bird or animal watching if you had the time.

The walls are very steep with lots of loose rocks so you have to be careful if you approach it from the side.  The pond can be reached by walking down the rocky arroyo from one end or by walking down to the wash basin.

The shopping cart helps give you a sense of the scale.  The pond had lots of tadpoles in it so the foxes may be here to feed on frogs or birds. Its an interesting, self contained ecosystem carved by what little rain we get throughout the year.  A few more pics can be found below:

Mesa Hills Arroyo on Flickr