Painting Process

When I paint, I combine both traditional techniques with methods I have learned on my own, or discovered watching other painters. One way to paint is to make a meticulous drawing on paper, and transfer the image to the canvas before rendering it in oils. Another way is to draw directly on the canvas using a dry brush with burnt umber on a toned canvas. I prefer this method. Depending on the image, I can sometimes actually pull it off! If I'm doing figure work or something more complicated, a drawing on paper is definitely the way to go.

This painting has a simple enough composition that I was able to draw with a dry brush, and bypass the paper drawing method. Plus, I had already painted the same scene in 8x10, so I was familiar enough with it. It went together pretty quickly, and was a lot of fun to paint.

Here is the first image after an hour of work:

And here, I have put in most of the sky, water, and the boat. The foreground and background are still incomplete:

Now, the background and the boat are nearly fully rendered:

Then I did some more work perfecting the details:

The client decided that they wanted to wait to frame it, and asked me to paint the sides of the canvas. Thankfully, I had used a gallery canvas that was thick. I didn't like the idea of just painting the sides one solid color, and suggested painting the image wrapping around the sides. I didn't even know if I could! I think it worked out pretty well:

And here is the finished piece, all done and delivered to the client: