The Smell Of Seaweed

I started off choosing rose dore, cerulean blue and raw sienna as my main three colours.  The first two were motivated by the greys in the sky and I picked raw sienna as my yellow because I didn’t want things looking too bright.  So this was in the key of green warm.  Green apatite genuine, hematite violet genuine and viridian also had big roles to play and French ultramarine, sepia, cadmium red and titanium white were also used for details.

I have a new technique to help me with composition.  I take a photo of the scene, then use an iPad app to crop the picture.  The app not only allows me to restrict the cropping to rectangles with 3*4 proportions (so that they’ll fit on the paper) but also divides up the rectangle into nine smaller rectangles, so that in my cropping I can try to get the horizon along the 1/3rd or 2/3rds line and the centre of interest at one of the four golden points.

So, yes, I picked a composition and put down a pencil outline.  Then I opened up my bottle of masking fluid, intending to mask out some buildings and parts of the boat.  But the fluid was all clotted like a nosebleed.  I added a bit of water and swirled it about a bit and ended up with something vaguely useable but not as good as fresh masking fluid.  Anyway, I used it then threw the bottle away.

The first paint to go on was the sky.  It was that same grey that I get when mixing rose dore and cerulean blue, so both of these colours went on.  I also put in some raw sienna because I was planning at the time to have the painting dominated by these three primaries.  Looking at the sky afterwards, there’s a lot of the red and the blue but not as much of their combined grey as I’d have liked.

And then I just worked the shapes from back to front.  The peninsula behind the boat is mainly green apatite genuine charged into an initial wash of raw sienna and with the odd bit of rose dore dropped in.  And the water was a muddy mix of my three primaries.

The foreground was where I had the most fun.  There’s a lot of green apatite genuine still in there but also lots of viridian.  Viridian doesn’t appear often in my paintings but I had to use it today as it’s a colour that evokes the smell of seaweed and that smell was something that I wanted to bring out in the painting.  There’s also raw sienna and rose dore in there and I found myself applying some quite dry hematite violet genuine to get some dark areas. And I threw on lots of salt to encourage the granulation and because seaweed’s full of it and put in some upward flicks with one of those Terry Harrison foliage brushes.

I removed what masking fluid there was and put in the boat and buildings using titanium white, French ultramarine, sepia and cadmium red.  The masking fluid had done such a poor job that it was necessary to go over the masked areas with white paint.

Finally, I added some birds in the foreground seaweed in white and sepia.  And then a seagull swooped overhead and convinced me to add another bird in the sky.

I should point out that the wind was pretty bad today, with all my gear being blown around whenever I dropped my guard.  Halfway through I decided to put the easel away and just sit down and paint.  No interruptions from people checking out my painting but a couple of friendly dogs came over to say hello.

As a whole, the painting feels like a greatest hits album that doesn’t hang together.  I like the sky (including the bird), the trees behind the boat and the foreground but I’m not sure the three of them belong together.  The boat and distant buildings haven’t really worked.  A lot of this is down to the masking fluid clotting but it’s also down to me not choosing a composition where they were big enough to paint a tiny bit more detail on them.  The foreground, though, with that texture and all those colours is the star of the show.  This one’s going up for sale.