Sunset Over Water

I love water. Painting it scares me and I am not very good at it yet. So I might as well practice.

In about 45 minutes tonight, I painted this in oils on an 8" by 10" canvas panel. Colors were a very limited palette. Charvin colors used were French Blue (the dark), Royal Blue (the light), Titanium White, Volcano Gray, French Red Deep and Medium French Yellow. I also used a tiny bit of Gamblin's Alizarin Crimson and lots of Payne's Gray.

Sunset Over Water, 8 by 10, in oils

As with virtually everything that I do, there are parts of it that I like and parts of it that I don't.  

There are a few things I know I will touch up when the paint has dried somewhat, specifically cleaning, brightening and concentrating the sun's vanishing point. Painting wet on wet with white and yellow onto blues and darker colors will give you green mud, and I needed to force myself to put down the brushes before I did too much of this. Look closely and you will see that I did just a little of this...and then had the good sense to stop.

When I come back to it I will also be able to add some brighter foreground wave highlights. From the viewer's perspective, the brighter highlights should be in a triangle with a vanishing point directly in front of the sun's location - everything off to the sides of that should fade away. As of now, the foreground wave highlights are off-centered to the right, and from a physics standpoint this makes no sense. If you drew a line from the sun's brightest point directly toward the viewer (the front), that's where the brightest bits should be. And I will also darken the left side of the land mass (it's OK that the right and top edge is lighted but the bulk of the lower and left side would fade into deep shadow). And the sky around the land mass is a little weird.

Which I guess brings me to a final point. There is something to be said for creating a painting up to a certain stage, and then stepping back (literally and figuratively) and critiquing your own work. My typical painting experience, and this one followed that pattern exactly is: (1) paint the painting. (2) step back and tell myself "that's awful". (3) Come back and look at the painting again, even just 20 or 30 minutes later and say "that's kinda OK after all." (4) Then I take a picture for posting here and try to critique the work objectively. I think that other than the part where I am overly hard on myself, that's probably a good progression to work through. In other words, I guess I should only do steps #1 and #4 - paint and then objectively critique.

On a positive note, I do think I have a pretty good eye for critiquing my own work. Which gives hope for the future. I know what I am striving for; I just need to figure out how to get there.

At the moment I set down my brushes on this one, Grace walked into the dining room (where I paint), looked at it, and said "that's pretty Dad, I like it." I responded with something along the lines of "meh...it's pretty terrible." She rolled her eyes, shook her head, and as she left the room, said "you're way too hard on yourself - I think it's nice."

She's right and I'm wrong. I've been painting for a little less than a year. It's not a masterpiece. But it's nice.

And maybe next time I'll do just a tiny bit better. That's the hope anyway.