Stormcloud Painting

Blue-Lighthouse-crop2That storm doodle sketch inspired me to try it again on a quarter sheet. Same two colors, same method, same laws of physics – totally different results! This is a cropped version, hiding a really prominent breaking wave at the bottom that was just bugging me as soon as I’d painted it.

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Stormcloud Doodle

020214-Storm-Doodle-w-lighthouseI was inspired by some stormclouds the other day and painted a sketch of them. PB28 Cobalt and PO62 benzimidazolone orange. Mostly washed on as pure color + let the laws of physics do the magic. (I did mix a little on the palette for the very deep accents in the clouds. ) Added the lighthouse after it was dry, I just couldn’t stop seeing one there so had to do it. About 5″ x 7″ on a loose piece of 140lb paper, probably the Richeson stuff I don’t really like. Worked well here though!

Approaching Storm

Sketchbook-4-070213This 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.