Nova Scotia Maritime

Painting a maritime scene from a photo taken in Nova Scotia. In this class project, we learned how to take a photograph and arrange and compose it to make a better painting.

Source Photo

The photo came from a friend of our teacher’s. The problems that were pointed out were:

• the boat is leaving the picture, which will take the viewer’s eye out of the frame
• the image is split in half
• it’s too busy with all the boats trailing the fishing trawler
• we want the point of main interest to be on one of vertices of the 3×3 grid

Thumbnail Sketches

I did a few thumbnails on my own to get a feel for how I wanted the painting to look. I really wanted to have a lighthouse in there on the end of land.

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Colour Study

Not being completely sure of the thumbnail I chose, I made a colour study in a painting journal just to get a feel for the final painting.

Cartoon sketch

Mask (frisket) applied

I wanted to keep several areas paper white: the boat, the lighthouse, plus their reflections, and the houses on the land.

Major work complete

All work complete

added a mat

Final version

Materials and Notes

Paper

Journal: Kilimanjaro natural white paint book, 140lb paper interleaved with writing paper, 5.5 x 10 inch, spiral bound. These are really cool, every watercolour paper leaf is interleaved with a piece of sketch paper. This came in quite handy doing the thumbnails on the sketch page facing the colour study.

Arches Aquarelle watercolour single sheet, 140lb cold press, 9 x 12 inch. The standard.

Paint

For this painting, I stuck almost entirely to the triad of:

• Rose Madder Genuine
• Raw Sienna
• Cobalt Blue

Addtionally, I used a couple other colors:

• Sap Green
• Quin Burnt Orange
• Chromatic Black (French Ultramarine and Quin Burnt Orange mixed)

Brushes

• Dreamcatcher #10
• Dreamcatcher #4
• Kolinsky Sable #2