I just wrote this for Esther’s weekly prompt. This week is Water:
Water today means too much rain. It’s been falling all day. Sometimes it’s a river flowing in the lake district. My hubby tried to tickle trout while we were on holiday one year. He was unsuccessful. Water is lake Windermere, before it got polluted with toxic green algae. Home of Arctic Char fish that got trapped there in the end of the last ice age. Water means the Atlantic and North Sea coasts where we visited on many holidays. I need to visit them again. Water is my tears of regret and happiness over all these memories.
Sitting on a blow up bed, with a trowel for a paddle, my hubby a few years ago decided to paddle across a bay in Devon. I was standing on the beach wondering whether to jump in the sea and drag him home to shore!
Always adventurous, he managed to get back after twenty minutes. He did slide off the bed and kicked for shore. I admired his strength, as the off shore breeze had started to tug him out to sea for a while.
He was grinning happily when he came back up to me on the beach. He enjoyed being adventurous and I was just glad I hadn’t had to call out the coast guard!
How do i know the water is blue? Surely it’s transparent. But look at the sea. As you go deep into it you can see it stays blue until you go deep when it’s black. Then look at water at sunset. It stays blue even when the sky turns red doesn’t it? And in yellow white sunshine its very blue. Not green, not yellow, not red, not purple – Blue.
I asked for a photo of my beach painting from the lady who bought it (it went to the person who had commissioned it and I had forgotten to take a picture). She was really happy with it. I tried to get that feeling of water washing on and out, flowing over the sand. A few dark rocks sit in the bottom right hand corner and I really tried to get bright sunny colours into it. I found the blue hard to get right, so I used a turquoise hue to get that marine feeling.
Tuesdays #bandofsketchers prompt was Overlooking. This is an imagined landscape in felt pens. Being in Stoke with a shaking arm means I don’t get to travel much. I want to go to the sea again, and being in an apartment overlooking an ocean view would be a good thing to do.
Blue, cobalt, ultramarine, pthalo blue, azure, cerulean, indigo, so many names for blue. When you choose colours to paint with you have to select the right one. When you choose you may want a transparent blue, or something stronger with a real depth of colour to it. If you want a colour to paint the sky you need to match what you see to what you can mix on the canvas. Sometimes you just can’t get the right combination of colours. Some blues have hints of red, or purple, or green or even yellow, it’s amazing how many variations of colours the eye can see. Sea, world, ocean, sky, so many blues.
I said I would post a picture of this finished painting of a blue crab when it had got to its new home. I tried to make it accurate but its quite hard to work out the fine details. I also brightened the blues and toned down the sandy background. I made the area behind the crab softer so that it goes backwards out of focus and added more detail to the foreground. It’s new owner is pleased with it I think.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was coast. I have done a few coast drawings recently and wanted to find a really picturesque view. I randomly chose a photo of the Australian coast to draw. When my felt pens run out I will have to try another technique!