I spent several days last week working on this painting from my recent trip to Mattapoisett. I decided on the 20 x 24 format because it’s a grand subject and needs a lot of space!  I took the picture on the first day I was there, driving my mother through town. We went to Crescent Beach and got this beautiful view of the harbor in late afternoon. It wasn’t  sunset, but the light was quite special.

I began with a charcoal drawing and wash.  I did the bottom half as an underpainting, thinking I’d work directly on the top without any color. But I couldn’t do it!  So I took three values of a pinkish red and created shapes of color. This made it much easier for me to begin laying in the color (which you can see at top left–almost forgot to film it first!).

I had issues with the color in the grasses. In the underpainting, I added some reds that I liked a lot. But when I started adding the pastel, I used siennas and other more orangey colors. Didn’t like it at all! So I got rid of it and used magentas and pinks, along with a variety of greens, keeping it all fairly dark. Really liked it as it picked up the reddish violet tones in the sky (a lot of the pink underpainting shows through). In the path, I used a variety of violets and browns, to pick up the color of the sky.

The sky (except for the lightest parts) is all Girault and Roche. The flat part of the sky at top is a combination of an aqua and a light warm grayed green Roche. They combined beautifully. The light is a lemon yellow Art Spectrum tinted white and  a little Schmincke yellow.  I used the lemon yellow pastel alone for the light on the water. I find it very hard to find a yellow that is light enough for the sky and clouds and this one is really good.

I really enjoyed working on this. So many of my pictures are taken on bright sunny days. Would like to do more atmospheric work, if I can get the right shots.  I work from both a black and white photo (that was taken closer up and used for the composition) and a color photo (that gave the color but a poor composition).  Neither was perfect and that was just fine. I changed the bottom left completely and changed what was a wider road to more of a path.  Am happy with this now.

Hard pastel underpainting

Charcoal wash

Harbor Light, 20 x 24, UART 400