Ucluelet [acrylic, 11’x15”]

I dropped in the first splashes of color on this painting of the view looking west from Ucluelet, BC Monday.  Since then though, I’ve covered pretty all of the original surface at least once.  That wasn’t the intention of the exercise but I kind of found my own way on finishing this one up.  I guess I’ll have to give that exercise another go on a different subject. 

Here’s a brief summary of the steps so far:

1.  You can see some of the original paint here which was slopped, splashed stamped, and covered the entire surface.  I had in mind a series of rocks and trees so my plan was to paint the rock shapes negatively with the white water.   However, I pretty much lost my original paint in this first step. 

2.  I developed the groups of trees, changed the horizon line, and worked on the rock shapes.  The colors are incredibly boring but I’ll deal with that last. 3.  I mixed up some two piles of green mixed with light molding paste – a dark grey-green and a light value reddish green.  I used a knife to add this loosely to reshape the trees in the foreground.

4.  Boring, boring, boring…  but believable.  Since the soil in the foreground is quite orangey, I decided to move that color around and go for an orange sky.  I mixed up a bunch of streaky, orange/white and redid the sky. 

There’s a bit more puttering to do on this painting but I’m reasonably happy with it.  The rocks in the distance are way too rounded…  that’s going to change next. 

RE: Self portrait…  I find something I want to change every time I take a photo of my self portrait.  Tomorrow I will post my final tweaks.  Cheers!

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