Thursday Jan 4th 2024 – 1pm-3pm EST
This is a fantastic scene to paint. Again we’ll be focusing on the big shapes and values. Getting the silhouette of the boats and foreground against the water and sky makes a fabulous painting.
I will record the drawing ahead of time and send out a link to it (it will also be on the youtube playlist too). If you want to do the drawing ahead of time please go ahead. I know that often people want to take time over this.
(All session materials are linked off the main page)
Materials:
- Student paper for mixing color swatches
- 100% cotton paper for the full painting (I’ll be using 10″x14″ but 9″x12″ is a good size too)
- Value scale (See the Useful Tools page)
- Pencil/Paint/Palette/Water/Paper towels/masking tape
- Brushes: A larger brush for the sky and foreground washes. A slightly smaller (10 or 12) for the trees and more detailed areas.
- Colors: Cobalt blue, Ultramarine, Burnt sienna, Vermillion/napthol/cad red (orangey red), Cad lemon/hansa yellow (greenish yellow), yellow ochre, black.
Reference Photo (click to enlarge and right click to download)
Reference Photo with grid
My Version (unfinished)
This isn’t quite finished. I wanted to show you the version before the final twiddly bit go in to show you how the big shapes work.
Drawing Video:
The Drawing:
Class Video:
Enjoyed this class despite complicated technical difficulties! Your process really helps me organize my thoughts. Looking forward to the boat …
Really lovely Liz. Good shapes and just the right amount of detail. One thing – if it were me I might be tempted to glaze over the orange grasses just to narrow the value range in there. But that’s a quibble. It might also make the contrast with the water too great. I sometimes import the photo of a painting into sketchbook on my ipad and adjust it there to see what would happen.
Oh and I’ll just copy this over to the session 1 page if that’s ok.
Thanks for your feed back. I so appreciate it. I agree the value range could use some smoothing out. I do not have an iPad at the moment. Is sketchbook a specific app or does it come with? Maybe I can do it on my iPhone?
It’s an app and I think it’s free although there are others that do much the same thing. I don’t like using my phone for this – the screen is just too small for me. But then I have the smallest iphone so not surprising.
I am open to anything should be corrected. thanks for the lesson
I think it has a really nice calm feel to it. Your values are pretty close together but it works. I would say that the hull of the front boat could go down a step or so in value. It would help tie that big foreground shape together.
But a great job – and your foreground graduated water wash is to die for.
I can see I may need to go darker in some places, and tone down the nets.
Enjoyed painting all the midtones in one shape … A little scary but it’s something I have been wanting to try. Thank you.
Lovely Laura. I was wondering what you would make of this as the scene is pretty low chroma and I know you naturally tend towards the other direction. But it really works as the values are good. That sky has a wonderful glow to it and the cloud reflections work too.
You could probably go a little darker in the foreground. It would make that sky really sing out.
Thank you, Michelle. Good idea re the foreground!
I think this is a bit overworked. I found the hull of the main boat quite challenging in terms of producing that beautiful fluidity of the dark bottom in both directions — the shadow below the water line and the weathered boat boards above the water line. All in all, a both fun and challening.
Yes that dark shadow and reflection can be tricky. You can always go in multiple layers to build it up if you need to. But it’s a really nice painting. Beautiful muted colors without being too gray. Again I wonder if the hull and interior of that front boat could go slightly darker. Probably only needs half a step or so.
This was a fun and challenging picture to paint! Learned a lot, especially about painting value shapes. I have always painted things in the past. I am happy with the overall results.
Michele, I am glad it turned out as well as it did, but I am open to any and all suggestions. I know I fussed a lot with it in the end. And the area of reflection does not read well. Enjoyed your class. Carol
I think it looks great. You have captured that slightly lighter area of the sun which works really well. And I rather like the reflection. Fantastic job.
Catching up from missed class. Any comments much appreciated. Thank you!
Despite my many mistakes and the power cut that we had whilst i was darkening the water – it is done!
I’m sure I could and will do better so I will try it again. All feedback welcomed!