Olympic Gold

It's back to Greece for me, and getting wild and crazy. In art class Tuesday Christina had a series of paintings done by artists she admired - and our assignment was to take a ref photo of our own choosing, and to try to paint the scene, but using the color palette of one of the paintings she had to show us. Plus she wanted us to *simplify simplify simplify* and just go with big, broad, basic shapes, though she wanted buildings or man-made objects. I chose a ref photo, of my trip to Greece, of the entranceway to the stadium at Olympia, home of the ancient Olympic games. My ref photo is the basic sort of dusty browns, grays, olives and tans that one might expect in Greece, but I chose the color palette of a painting that was mostly all vivid orange, gold, red and purple - and used those colors for my palette! And just turned off my thinking brain and let my fingers take over! So this is what I came up with. One odd thing in the photo is that the underside of the archway shows as a pale bue, but it's actually much darker than that. I  used a pale blue as  an underlayer but then used darker blues and purples on top. I wonder why only the underlayer shows? It makes the painting look a bit "weird".