Fearless Friday, Breaking Waves

the Painted Apron

9 years ago

I posted a tutorial about this painting 2 years ago, long before Fearless Friday was born

I have had a very busy end of May, and sadly haven’t touched my paint brushes or pens, but I hope to make up for it in the next few weeks

I hope you don’t mind the revisit to Breaking Waves, it’s one of my favorite paintings and deconstructs the mystery of painting water and the adventure of using unpredictable colors

This painting was done for my daughter, whose house is decorated in mostly gray and white

It’s in her entry and you can see it from her living room below where another of her commissions, Cool Calm & Collected, hangs

Painting is not a mysterious magical process, but rather just a series of steps and layers of colors and shapes…

I usually paint with a very limited palette and mix my own colors. This helps keep the finished work uniform and cohesive

For this acrylic painting I used Titantium White, Cerulan blue, Hanza Yellow Light, Cadmium Yellow Medium and Naphthol red light. I used black gesso for the underpainting

I always paint the entire canvas with an underpainting, either a complementary color of the main color in the painting or black as for this painting

this canvas is 30″ x 40″

I slowly added layers of color and shapes, working from a reference photo of the ocean

I generally try to complete a painting in one session, to keep the flow and the colors consistent. The worse thing you can do is overwork a painting. If you get stuck, walk away for a while, an hour, a day, but not too long or you’ll loose your feel