Decided to approach my next piece of work from a different starting point. Inspired by Lab No. 27 from the great little book "Paint Lab" by Deborah Forman, I tore a large sheet of Saunders Waterford watercolour paper into six roughly equal pieces and, inspired by a photo of Paul and the kids leaning off a jetty in the Florida Keys, gave myself 30 minutes to quickly work in acrylic to block in some compositions and colour schemes, using a limited palette of three or four colours.
Here's what I ended up with.
Over the next couple weeks I have been working on two or three of these further to develop them into small paintings. After a little while the third one above progressed to this stage:
After some more detailed work on the figure I ended up with this little picture:
In parallel I was also working on image 1 from the initial six studies. I first glazed the whole thing with a layer of mid tone grey-blue through which I hoped the brighter colours would glow through in places. I then worked from dark to light to develop a three figure composition:
After a bit more painstaking (!) work on the figures I felt the picture had reached resolution:
Looking back at the initial sketches it still always amazes me how these images evolve out of the paper and paint. It feels a bit like magic. I'm guessing other artists probably also get this feeling sometimes (on good days anyway!).
Postscript
Initial sketch no.4 has a lovely velvety glowing colour in real life and rather than painting over it I'm planning on doing a white ink sketch of pelicans on top of it. Sketch 6 also evolved a bit further but did not entice me to finish itself (as yet). Maybe one day...
Here's what I ended up with.
After some more detailed work on the figure I ended up with this little picture:
In parallel I was also working on image 1 from the initial six studies. I first glazed the whole thing with a layer of mid tone grey-blue through which I hoped the brighter colours would glow through in places. I then worked from dark to light to develop a three figure composition:
After a bit more painstaking (!) work on the figures I felt the picture had reached resolution:
Looking back at the initial sketches it still always amazes me how these images evolve out of the paper and paint. It feels a bit like magic. I'm guessing other artists probably also get this feeling sometimes (on good days anyway!).
Postscript
Initial sketch no.4 has a lovely velvety glowing colour in real life and rather than painting over it I'm planning on doing a white ink sketch of pelicans on top of it. Sketch 6 also evolved a bit further but did not entice me to finish itself (as yet). Maybe one day...
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Please leave some feedback for me! Sheila