In early June, I posted the importance of doing practice work before attempting your final painting. I mentioned this because I made two watercolor paintings before completing the final work. The idea was to increase the potential for profit. (If you haven’t already read the article, I recommend you do so by clicking on the picture of me painting at the left.) After completing the practice paintings, I am finally finishing my latest painting, “Fishing the Everglades”.
I’ve worked on these three paintings for the past month. However, my goal is to paint at least three acceptable paintings each month. It helps if you can get ideas for more than one painting from one well thought out composition. Without overdoing it too much, I’m going to take the liberty of posting the compositional drawing for the three latest paintings before discussing them.
The large graphite drawing to the right is the original planned composition. My first painting was a small section of the overall composition, and was featured in the earlier mentioned blog post in written in June. It was a composition on its own taken from a portion of the larger composition located in the upper left hand side. It shows the Banyon tree and the Banana Tree.
This went well, and I learned a lot about trees and water. However it was a practice well intended, and,most importantly, turned out to be successful enough painting to frame and sell. The second practice painting was the right side of the composition. The point of interest in the painting becomes the cabin, rather than men in the boat fishing. Therefore, I changed the color of the roof on the cabin to make more of an impact area. I painted a small boy and man at the end of the deck, showing the boy fishing. This, of course, is not in the original composition, but helped make it a more complete composition to stand alone.
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There was a third practice painting that was scheduled, but I began toying with the larger painting, and did not get around to practice the painting of just the three men in the boat fishing. I still intend to paint it, however, I intend to change up the values, making the darkest value the sky and the faraway trees…working it dark, middle, and light. I haven’t a clue how that will turn out.
The large painting below is the composition planned from the beginning. I call it, “Fishing the Everglades.” The painting is really painted as a 22″X30″. However, to fit it with a 24″X36″ glass, it had to be cropped.
