This is the third scene from a notebook of sketches I did about 30 years ago - a trip to Chandeleur Island. I sketched it out at the same time as the sunrise scene that I am so fond of. I finally got around to working it up over the weekend. It started out in a very flat almost Hockney-esque color scheme. I immediately liked how the three big windows framed little mini paintings inside the big painting. After I took this photo, I squared up and evened out the left window frame. An advantage of taking photos and looking at them on small screens is that you can see problems that aren’t always apparent in a full size view. I also liked how the grey iron rails divide up the water and sky into rectangular blocks. I also liked how the water line stretches through all the windows and doors. The original scene appealed to me because you saw all the way through to the stern and out into the water. I left out the string of dinghies at the stern in the original scene.
I had nothing on the right foreground and the scene seemed out of balance. So I added a figure - a deckhand taking a nap. I ran into trouble over the difference between the flat pencil style of the rest of the painting and the painterly molding of the deckhand. I still think I’ll have to go back and get the anatomy done right and then simplify how the deckhand is rendered to harmonize with the treatment of the rest of the painting. But for now, I am leaving it as is. I like it generally pretty well.
I am happy with how the head and hands turned out on the figure on the left, especially the red and pink strokes in the face. I also like the striped shirt. It started out with much darker blue stripes and then I used lighter blue on top and alongside it, and it has a nice fresh effect. Simple.
The first attempt at the deckhand had issues with anatomy and overall it was too small compared to the figure on the left. I reworked it and borrowed a few bits from a sketch of Michelangelo. It made me realize how much I would enjoy doing a deeper dive into figure studies. I hope I get to do this in the future. The figure is below the painting. By “borrowed” I intend to say that I redrew the head and shoulders area to give the deckhand a longer neck, raise the shoulder up, and draw the connection of the shoulder to the back.. Also I reworked how the arms folded underneath the head. And I added a little detail to the torso and will add more but I couldn’t go full Michelangelo with a twisting torso. The sleeping pose doesn’t permit it.
Still at work on this. I did additional work on the torso on the right and got it closer to what I wanted. For the overall scene to work, I couldn’t leave that big empty space in the middle foreground -it seemed deliberately incomplete. So I added a third figure working from a mental sketch of another member of the trip. I sketched it, then put the figure on in pencil, then used a brush with turpentine to dissolve and solidify the lines, and add some gray tones. (Thanks Ruff) Then I painted it in. When I got the other two done, I had to take a hard look at the first one; The head and hands were too big and the basic style was out of sync with the others, so I reworked it to harmonize it with the other two. So I got it to this stage, but I still need to adjust the perspective. The new addition seems to be on a slope instead of a flatter surface. I added some pencil lines as seams to suggest the slope, but the figure needs to be more foreshortened. There also is an adjustment to the left rail to do. That’s the next stage.
I did some more work on it over the past week (early January 2020) and here is where it now stands. I really like the head on the left and I also made some headway on the foreshortening of the figures.
