Painting "Fat Boy" –– Part Two.

This is the second part of the oil painting I am working on titled, "Fat Boy." I left off with the beginning of painting in the reflection of the green boat as shown above.

 Here you can see that I have added the railing to the reflection.

And, here are more reflection details added to the small boat, and you can see that I have increased the light falling on the grass in the background and the posts in the water.

At this point, I begin adding details to areas that need it.

I do a lot of small touchup work. My palette has a lot of colors on it and I use a little of this, and a little of that, to fix little spots all over the painting.

I am also looking for things that bother me. I felt that the green boat was competing too much with the blue boat, so I needed to push it back a little more. I decided that I needed to make the white areas of the green boat darker in shadow.

That's better. I also fixed the mess I created when I roughed in the life-saving ring on the upper railings of the green boat. I also painted in some sunlight hitting the railings overall.

Once I was happy with the little touches of detail on the boats, I moved back down to the reflections. The little waves needed the boat's reflections. Reflections on waves are tricky. Each wave catches just a tad of the boat's reflection on their top surface. The reflections jump down from wave to wave until they run out of steam. 

As funny as it sounds, an artist has to be brave to accomplish good work. The photo on the left shows how I brought the reflections down to the small waves. But, after doing that, I didn't like that the main reflection of the boat stopped before it hit the little waves. I needed to break up that part with a new wave. The photo on the right shows that I took my sky reflection (blue paint) and just wiped it across the lower half of the main reflection. If this didn't work, I would have to repaint the reflection back in, which I was willing to do if I had to.


But, it seemed to do what I wanted it to and now the small waves look for realistic as they break up the main reflection just enough.

After a session or two of final details, "Fat Boy" is done. After drying for a week or so, it will be ready to ship back to the Felder Gallery for exhibition. This painting was a bit difficult for me as my attention kept moving to other things while I was completing it. We have visitors for the States and were in the process of finding a new house and moving. 


Persistence finally paid off, and I am happy with the results. Another harbor scene under my belt. I can't say that this photo is exactly right color-wise, as I was having a hard time finding good light when I shot it. You can see color shifts throughout my posts. 


Here is the original reference photo for comparison:

You can see the liberties I took to create a painting and not just a reproduction of the photo. The water and the background are the most dramatic differences. No longer are the messy buildings junking up the scene. The water in the photo is nice, but I don't like it as broken up as the photo shows.

Here's my work space as I finished up the last details of the piece. Lots of jars are needed. When the brush cleaner gets too full of paint, you let it sit in the jar for a day or two and it settled to the bottom. Then, you pour off the clear liquid into another jar and let the old one harden, to be used again and again.

I'll end with this photo of my "paint pot." I wipe my palette off with a palette knife and deposit it into this plastic pot. Now its overflowing and I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. It probably has $100 worth of wasted paint, but that's just the way it is. You can't think of the money while painting, you just have to go with the flow. If you've squeezed out too much paint onto your palette then you ended up using, then that's too bad. Don't cry over spilt paint!