I find lighthouses are irresistible subjects when I want to test some paper… there is no better excuse to paint a sky!
This is some 140lb Fabriano Cold Press that I’m considering for the next sketchbook. Have been using various brands of 140lb rough for the last three books and decided to change it up a bit. I like using something different in each, keeps me from getting stagnant.
Paper test! The first washes looked really good, so I decided to finish it up. PB28, PO62, and PBr7 Burnt Umber. It’s 12″ x 4″ on 140lb Fabriano Artistico Rough.
And yes, I love the paper!
This sketch started around Christmas as an exercise in painting water, and was supposed to be a boulder in a wild running stream. I put down the boulder and the Kyanite (the silvery-gray color) then got bored and moved on.
This week I decided that I was never going to paint the riverbank above the rock, so used the blank top half to practice a cerulean sky. This made the water look like the sea, except it needed a reason to be reflecting all that gray! That led to a storm moving in. A Monthly Challenge on WetCanvas.com, plus a film I’d seen, got me thinking about lighthouses. There was no reason why the boulder couldn’t be a small rocky island, so made a few adjustments, and there we are.
This is just a wee bit brighter IRL, but not much… there’s sort of cool haze to it, as if the light is weak and watery and all but snuffed out by the incoming weather. Funny experience, I was laying in the bottom of the clouds and the line looked more like the top of a mountain, and I actually thought, “Oh, look! A land mass!”
6″ x 9″ Arches 140lb rough, in my sketchbook. Paints mostly WN PB35 Cerulean, DS Bloodstone Genuine and Kyanite Genuine. There’s a touch of DS Sodalite Genuine for the darkest darks, and I can’t promise there isn’t a dash of DS Piemontite in the rocks as well. The scene is entirely made up, although I did check a few lighthouse refs to make sure the details were at least reasonably close to reality.
I’ve been digging through scads of old photos this weekend, scrounging for reference pics. Found a few winners, including this shot of some pebbles on the lakeshore in Chicago, taken on vacation in 1998.
I wanted to keep a limited palette and also explore the sand-creating possibilities of the best granulator I know: Daniel Smith Genuine Purpurite. This stuff is so granular it’s almost best not to really paint with it, as much as dab it on and let the water float it around.