I Live by the Sea

This morning I had a wonderful walk on the beach with the dogs.  Unfortunately I don’t have any pics as my phone was on charge.   There were great clouds, the tide was out and the dogs went mad.  It was great.  I even managed to find some booty to use in future paintings.

Beach Booty drying out

I love living by the sea.  When I moved down to the south coast of England from London, I never would have imagined how much my life would change.  This is where I started to  paint.  One would think that since I love the sea so much I would actually paint it!  Heh!  There are loads of reasons why I haven’t, but none worth writing about.  Anyhow, I painted a seascape today.

Seascape – Acrylic on Canvas – A4 size

I decided to go back to acrylics for awhile and had prepared some canvases I bought ages ago.  I went straight onto the white canvas with sand textured gel and glass bead gel for the beach part and then used a soft gel for the rest.  I used ultramarine blue, phthalo blue (green hue), yellow ochre, burnt sienna and titanium white.  I used two brushes and a palette knife.  I want to use the knife more and have more texture in my paintings.  I even used my fingers.

I have put away my watercolors for the time being.  I have been staring at an old acrylic painting I did ages ago and wanted to make it better.  So I will be working on some smaller pieces and trying out different grounds before I make another mark on it.  I have all of this stuff, so I might as well use it!

 

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Bits and Bobs

I am not a doodler.  I don’t have a sketchbook. No, I lie.  I have a few, but I don’t really use them.  I have tried, but I am not naturally inspired to draw or paint anything.  I never did it when I was a child either.   I know there are lots of artists who draw things out first, but I am not really one of those.  I also don’t plan.  I work off of ideas or something that inspires me.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes not.  Here are a few small pieces that I did recently.

Lavender Fields – Watercolor on Bockingford – Half A4 size

This is a practice piece, but I like it.  This is only one wash and took a few minutes, wet on dry.

Squash – Oil pastel on Paper – half A4

I bought some little squashes to paint, but I kept putting it off until now.  I wasn’t confident painting them in watercolor, so I got out my oil pastels.  For me, this is a doodle.  I can use this as a reference for something else if I want to.  I am not confident with oil pastels.  I think that you have to be really good with drawing and mark making.  To be frank, I really don’t know what to do with them and the books I have are a bit traditional.  I had loads of cheap pastels, but I sifted through them and gave some to one of my neighbour’s children and the rest to the charity shop.  I only have good ones now.

Winter landscape  – Watercolor on Bockingford – Half A4 Cropped

I painted this last week, but wasn’t happy with the bottom under the trees, now in the foreground and decided to add trees to the horizon of the sky and make a lake.  It looks better, but I will probably try this again on a fresh piece of paper.  Sorry about the quality, but my phone doesn’t like the purple and wants to make it blue.

That’s it for now. Happy painting!

Painting Myself Purple

This weekend I worked with the color Purple.  Purple is such a fickle color and finding the right one can be tricky.  I have some ready mixed ones that range from red tones to blue.  I think I might need to work on mixing them.  I hear French Ultramarine Blue is very good mixed with Alizarin Crimson.

Winter Landscape – Half A4 Bockingford – Winsor Violet and French Ultramarine Blue (W&N)

Working from a suggestion in the book, I painted the above landscape.  There is supposed to be a path at the bottom of the page, but it was too dark and didn’t work out, so I am thinkin of cropping it as above.  I might even add another line of trees under the sky to make a frozen lake in the middle.  The painting should have been more like the one below:

You should just about make out the shadows on the snow.  I will probably try this a few more times as I am still not sure about the bottom half of the painting.  I do like how the trees and sky turned out though.

Lavender – Half A4 Bockingford

I’m still getting to grips with working with wet on dry and then adding water.  These small sketches will make nice cards.

I know the painting below isn’t purple, but I worked with green a couple of weeks ago and made some backgrounds I really liked.  This one below was used to paint some rosemary.

Rosemary – Half A4 Bockingford

I’m not sure about this.  I really love the background, but not my rosemary. Practice, Practice, Practice. 🙂