I’ve been remiss with my postings!  Here is a painting I just finished yesterday that I began a week ago. It’s from Stonington, ME. I loved the scene when I took the photo: the horizontal pier with boats and poles and three trucks!  The vertical porch at bottom with flowers and a neat pattern of darks underneath. But even more so: the boat against the pier!  It had everything and I basically copied the photo!!!  There really wasn’t much I changed in this one, but I did try to make it more interesting and a little more painterly, particularly when doing the trucks and the water. I began it with watercolor, using a warm green for the sky and water that I hoped would give some glow. It worked nicely in the sky.  As you can see, the watercolor ran all over the place in the pier. But I could see my drawing well enough to recoup it.  The photo was really dark and I started it out really dark.  Afterwards I brushed a lighter grayed red violet on over the dark part of the pier to give it more of a sense of light.  Perhaps you can see the difference if you look at the final and the partial version.

In this painting I used both pastel pencils and hard pastels to achieve some of the detail in the pier. The Carbo-Othello pencils are soft enough to work nicely and I used them to blend the colors in the water and pier and for some of the finer lines in the poles and lines. For the pier in the foreground, I began it with a lot of blue violets, then warmed it up with warm neutrals.

A Working Harbor, 20 x 16, Pastelbord

Watercolor underpainting

Partially painted