Pemaquid Wave - PhotographThis month's challenge subject shared with my friend Peter Ward, (watercolourfanatic.blogspot.com). I set the challenge with the photograph above. It is a shot that I took whilst in Maine last month. As is too often the case I became pressed for time and don't think I've given this the attention that it deserved. Art fair and house guests along with the usual grand parenting tasks seem to have eaten up the month.
What would I have done differently given sensible planning? Well the first thing would be to do a test strip on how the various hues worked together. First mistake was to choose the wrong blue as the basis for the sea. It jars against some of the hues. I tried to kill it a little by putting on a second wash and it's not as successful as I'd hoped. I was pleased that I decided to crop the sky out of the picture as it would have created another horizontal line across the picture. Some of my mixes didn't work out first time, again something that could have been remedied by testing beforehand. Just a bad day I suppose.
Pemaquid Wave - watercolour on Rough paper 14" x 11"
8 comments:
It was a good day, Mick not a bad one. As with Peters's the sea could be darker and greener, which would have made the water to the right of the curling wave darker - thus making the breaking wave closer. Foreground is great.
An odd thing about sea water is that the colder it is the less "blue" it seems. North seas are more "greenish grey" than blue most of the time. I agree that you went too "blue" for the ocean but I really like how your wave works! Did you preserve the whites on the rocks with gouache, or resist, or purely with negative painting?
It's never a bad effort if you learn something....I keep telling myself that over , and over...and over!!
Ray - Thanks. You are right about sea colour. If I'd got that right the balance of the whole thing would be better.
Hap - Your colour suggestion is correct and I wish I'd thought of it before starting out. Thanks for your comment about the wave.
I preserved some of the whites with masking fluid. You're right about the learning process, it's just that some days you need to learn more than others.
Quite different to my take on it Mick. Maybe you have fallen between two stools with this one though who am I to say! The painting seems to be in three sections. Could they have been linked together better? I made no attempt to replicate the actual colours.
Peter - Thanks. I was aware of the possibility of it being divided into sections and attempted, by slight angling of the lines to indicate a shallow zig zag. It clearly didn't come off. Onwards to the next challenge.
I like it very much Mick, it has a great freshness about it and you have captured the sunny feel of a windswept day by the sea. The wave looks nice to me as it does have the impression of crashing down which is important. Looking forward to seeing the next challenge.
Caroline - Thanks so much. I think that there are aspects of this that can be built upon. I like your remark about freshness, isn't that the joy of watercolour paint.
Post a Comment