Began work on a new painting — this one is from a photo Norma took when we were on vacation on Monhegan Island, Maine, in September.  This one features a colorful sky, a big dark rock, the ocean, and a group/flock of Cormorants.  I’ll attach below the original reference photo.  I decided for the painting i would decrease the size of the rock and increase the amount of ocean (and waves!).  At first i wasn’t sure this would work, so did some preliminary drawings and moving around of stuff (not shown here).  I think it’s going to work.  I”ll have to be careful about the size of the birds, but they will be the last thing i do in the painting.  So not worried about that — yet.  Worked today on sky and water.  Sky all wet on wet — trying to get a feel of a lot of blending.  Since there are no clouds it has to come together without seeming too stark.  The water color i know is “off”.  There are a few ways to fix that — haven’t decided yet how to do it.

Worked this week on trying to get the buildings to look better.  Then worked on the man in the boat.  Getting ready to be done with this one.  Will try to attach both photo of progress on this one and also photo of idea for next project.

This week at home i worked on the water reflections.  Also added more color to the sunset and part of the sky.  In class we began painting in color on the buildings.  I was hoping this teacher’s instruction around this would clarify for me how what we are doing is impressionistic.  He continues to say Impressionism is all about light and brush strokes.  that is, brush strokes would all be short.  The thing is, these buildings are so small, (canvas itself is only 9” x 12”) and the area around the windows and doors is so small that i am using a small (#2) brush, and there is no way to make long strokes anywhere except in the sky and water.  So i decided well, ok, my contribution to being impressionistic would be in part to make the buildings more colorful than in the original.

I added a glaze to the water reflections to bring out the orange color more.  Still not thrilled with how blue the water is, but i’m Leaving it alone for now.