Sardinia Cove Painting -- Quick Update

This is just a quick post to show my progress on my Sardinia painting underpainting and next layer -- still at a rough stage of filling in the main colours. The photo is a bit not true to the colours as it is indoors under artificial light. Today I used cadmium orange mixed with some venetian red as the red undercoat, with added ultramarine for darker parts. The sky is a mix of cerulean blue and ultramarine blue, with some titanium white added  for the lighter parts. The mauve undercoat helps a bit I think to add resonance. I will build up in layers to the lighter colours in the end. For the green sections, a mix of the cerulean, ultramarine and cadmium yellow is used. This is just a darker layer for starters. I will work on the shading and lighter detail as I progress. I will post further updates as I progress....

Sardinia Cove Painting -- Painting an initial undercoat to an Oil Painting

Today I managed to fit in an hour or two of painting and this is the result. I under painted the Sardinia Cove initial sketch with a pale mauve sky and then I painted the sea with a darker mix of the same by adding cerulean blue to the initial mix of permanent mauve and titanium white. The land surrounding is darker still by just intensifying the cerulean and mauve levels in the mix and so this is the finished underpainting. This is a bit of an experimentation. The aim is to give the final painting colours more resonance from the effect of the under colour interaction with the top layers.

 

Below is the first layout of the sketch on canvas.

Finding a subject to paint

Sardinia Cove Sketch

Gathering reference material and thinking about ideas for the next painting is something most artists are doing all the time to a greater or lesser degree. It's the only way to avoid the dreaded staring at a blank canvas and wondering what to paint! Anyone who has tried painting has sat there doing that at one stage or another. It's the artist's equivalent of writer's block.
That's probably why painting outdoors is so popular in warm countries, as there is always something worth painting, just take a stroll around and it doesn't take long to settle on something worthwhile.

So I have been thinking about my next painting now...and I am going to try a painting based on a sketch I made in Sardinia...actually I didn't sketch it at the time I saw it, as I was on a sailing boat trip. It was midday and we were anchored in a small inlet with one or two other yachts nearby. From there I swam to a nearby rock about 30 yards away, climbed out, put on my runners, which I had floated to shore on a small float board, and climbed up a hill through a series of rocks to look down on the boat. I sat high up there about 200ft or more above the cove. The sun was high and all the water shone a sparkling blue like you see in the Carribean. It was a perfectly tranquil day, with the blue haze of distant land on the horizon, and I tried hard to memorise the scene, the warmth and glow of the water, the sky and the rocks and the shapes of everything. The position of the boats and the cove itself. So here is the sketch I made after, and hopefully I can create something special which will bring me back to that moment.

I really love all those Mediterranean places, like Sardinia and Italy and want to paint more...so now that I am starting back into painting after quite a while of absence, I have a subject that I think I will really enjoy.

I hope to progress the painting over the following weeks and post it here as I don't get so much time for painting at present, so check back for to see posts of my progress.