Topic du jour - landscapes. Mark brought some posters with various landscapes. I picked a seascape, which I did not finish in class. I was overwhelmed by the size of the painting - half a sheet - and the amount of details in the rocks, foliage etc. I started fidgeting with small brushes trying to add shadows on the rocks. I need a faster way to add texture! Here is the result:
In the classroom, the colors looked somewhat lifeless, but when I checked at home in daylight, everything looked better. I took a picture of the poster because I want to work on this a bit more. This is Fabriano hot pressed paper - this posed an additional challenge because the paint dried almost instantaneously.
Before starting on the painting, we did composition and colour sketches, but not thumbnails. I found them much more useful at this bigger size, especially for a subject with so much detail. And I got to try two compositional approaches: one with the horizon line higher and one with the horizon line lower. For the final painting, I chose to lower the horizon as it made more sense given the size of my paper.
