Seascape Artist

A lady at work is retiring next month - I have decided that I need to paint her a seascape painting but I am not sure yet what exactly to paint … so I am in the planning stages … for me, that means I will look at lots of ocean and sea reference photos and see what colors and format I think will work best for me to give to her.

I’ve already decided that I want to do a large watercolor for her - 18″ x 24″ - though I plan on it being a vignette type in the middle of the paper. I went to Hobby Lobby this week-end to get paper to wrap my grandson’s birthday present - I had to look at art materials while I was there {grin} just in case there might be something I wanted that I do not have. Sure enough … they had a clearance book that I decided I wanted.

The book is about keeping a watercolor sketchbook. I haven’t read it yet but I did leaf through it some and it looks really interesting.

Today I went to my daughter’s for cake for my grandson’s birthday even though his birthday is not until Wednesday - he has football practice on Wednesday anyway and they plan to take him out to eat as well - he isn’t getting his birthday presents from me until Wednesday - he got 1 present today - his step-brother was there this week-end and they wanted him to share in celebrating my grandson’s birthday.

Anyway, that is only one of the reasons I did not get it read from cover to cover today. The name of the book is “Keeping a Watercolor Sketchbook” by Brenda Swenson - it is a Walter Foster Artist’s Libray Series book. Here are some of the highlights from it that have to do with seascape painting - only because a lighthouse is the illustration probably but close enough in my mind.

On page 12 of the book, it talks about shape & corresponding forms. One of the pictures illustrated is a lighthouse. It doesn’t say which shape and form are the lighthouse but to me, the shape is two ovals on a rectangle which makes for a cylinder … until I started seeing these kinds of shapes in objects, I could not get any buildings to ever look even close to “right” when trying to sketch them … when I’m in a hurry … I still just jot down a quick impression but it is enough for me to sketch it much better and true to life in an actual painting because I sketch the shapes instead of trying to get the “reality” without building it.

On page 14, there is another lighthouse sketch that is more developed with shading and details instead of basic shapes / forms - the topic of discussion is about using visual shorthand in your sketchbook and how it needs to make sense to you even if no one else would ever understand it. This is good advice - I tend to write my self notes about the important things I do not want to forget as well as try to indicate where the shading was that I noticed in the light and how things overlap each other - in one sketch I have … I did the background then put the tree over it so I could see what would not be seen in a finished painting to know what I was taking out and to decide if I wanted it there or to move the tree to show some of the background in that spot. The sketch looks a little unusual to anyone else but I know what I was trying to get down to jog my memory later in the studio when I pull the sketch out to create a painting based on it.

On page 37, there is a lovely fully developed color sketch as well as a photograph of the lighthouse the sketches appear to have been based upon (to my eye anyway). The topic is about capturing the spirit of your journeys, vacations, trips here & there and how your sketches of the area may capture flavor and mood that a camera just cannot capture. I find that sketches done on-site many times will give me enough clues to get that flavor in a studio painting later that I would never remember from just looking at a photograph. I do not try to recreate detail by detail paintings anyway so for me … the mood, the colors … the feelings … the weather … all are very important to me later and the sketch will help me find it within my memory whereas the photo images are better for me to use as shapes such as the actual shapes of tree branches and how they make patterns against the sky perhaps if that is what captured my imagination about the scene.

Try to keep your sketchbook with you handy where-ever you go during your regular day to day life - that way if you find something you want to quick sketch for later … you will have it there and handy - before I started carrying mine with me in the car, I would find myself wishing I had one so I could jot down something interesting I saw on the way to work or that I noticed at lunch … don’t just make it something available only on vacations or special trips or outings to sketch on location.

It doesn’t matter if you use watercolors, watercolor pencils like me, ball point ink pens, markers, a school pencil or a set of crayons in your sketchbook - if you put in the sketches .. .they will capture moments of your life for later … that you can paint in the studio or that you can just remember the moment without creating a painting from the sketch. Right now, I have given all my sketches in my car-sketchbook titles as well as signing them. I am doing this on purpose as a reminder to myself that even my quick sketches are important to me and deserve my respect even if they are not something that I would want to put up for sale … though several are really good and would appear to be finished paintings to someone else and they capture something … special … to me anyway.

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