Again to Fort Morgan and again perched on the back of our pickup truck. I looked out over Bon Secour bay from a location where kayakers and fishermen put in and saw a clear well-lit peaceful scene. I did a sparse underdrawing in gray after putting in some vertical and horizontal thirds. When I started I thought the appeal was going to be the water and sky.
I painted paler and thinner colors in the water and middle distance and had darker and more opaque color in the nearest point to shore. Most of this was done with small to medium angle brushes. For the sky and some of the water I used rounds and brights. This shot's poor quality is because it was taken in the back of the truck bed on the ferry heading home.
Back home the next day, I corrected the horizon and set to work on enlivening the water and sky. I was taken by the darker patches of water where the wind stirred up the surface into an interesting texture. I also wanted to have a vivid sky and so I did some loose brushwork with some unmixed colors. I did a fair amount of work on the nearest point of land, reworking it over and over. I also darkened the patch of shrubbery in the lower right but that turned out to be too much..
I deepened the cerulean blue in the sky and did some palette knife work to give the clouds some weight. I also spent a lot of time trying to get the foliage right on each of the strips of land. There is a risk in using the same brush to describe ever further away areas of the painting. The eye doesn't read these as being further away if they are the same basic width and length. I liked the water effect in this stage pretty well. For scale, I added Christina putting in from shore, but it was immediately clear she and the boat were too small for the surroundings.
To bring this to an end, I had to replace the existing figure with Christina in the kayak coming to shore, eliminate the small sand bar on the left and the shrubbery in the lower right, and do a series of refinements on the sky, water, and greenery fringing the water. With these changes I got to this point.
This is another piece that was completed in the studio with less and less dependence upon a reference photograph.
Lately I have been checking the dynamics of the composition by flipping the scene horizontally. A number of times, I find myself more attracted to the flipped version. I am curious if others notice a preference like this as well.
