Lighthouse with Delphiniums, 20″ x 16″, pastelbord

Reference photo

This is painting number five.  I’m including the original photo so you can see the changes I made. This is Pemaquid Light in Maine. I must have bent down in order to get the tops of the lighthouse and adjoining buildings with the delphiniums rising about it. I really liked the buildings, but knew that I wanted to make this a vertical to go with the others. So I had to make some compositional changes. I shortened the back building to the right of the lighthouse, and moved the lighthouse behind it.  Liked this much better. Then, I decided to show some of the water and lawn so as to provide some distance.  I removed the large brown structure that might be a raised garden bed.  But the key change was to make the sky blue and to add light and shadow to the painting!  This was not easy!  I used a picture of a lighthouse on Cape Cod that had light and shadow on it and went from there, adding it to the house and roof. Then, I decided that I really didn’t like the delphiniums the way they were in the photo, so I placed them more at random. I also removed the pine trees on the side of the house, moved the flag pole, a removed the dormer as well!  Hopper made changes; so can I!!!  But, you notice, I decided not to call it Pemaquid Light.

I did a watercolor underpainting on this one as well, using warm yellow green under sky and house and lots of dark greens below. I liked the pinks in the sweat peas.  The white flowers in the photo turned out to be petunias!  But I couldn’t have petunias in this location!  So I made them into something more generic.  I tried to place them strategically so as to lead the eye into the picture.

I looked at a lot of photos of Pemaquid Light on the internet. Not one of them was taken from this perspective with a flower garden. So I think this is somewhat unique!