Between daily life tasks, time with family, freelance work and my occasional teaching, I don't seem to find a lot of time to simply do artwork that has no "purpose." There are some subjects that often inspire me to paint in oils, to lay down color and create atmosphere with rich paint for the pleasure and challenge of it. Landscapes, primarily, inspire these feelings. Not that I've done any! But I have wanted to try my hand at them. So since my last Over Coffee, I did just that. In this case, I used a photo I took 7 months ago at Ocean Shores, WA as my subject matter. When I took the photo, it was with a future oil painting in mind.
Below are four photos showing stages of the painting. Once I did a quick tonal study in burnt sienna, I started blocking in the dark colors of paint over the tonal underpainting, followed by the application of some lighter colors:
Above, I had applied a light coat of titanium white over the sky. Below, the painting is further developed by my working on the buildings other than the large pink house. I applied an overall coat of gray over the sky.
The blue-gray was too blue for the classic, overcast-gray sky, so below you can see the change: another coat of paint over the sky! Problem: paint layers were, ahem, starting to get clumpy. Even with oils, there's a limit to over-painting areas, I am learning.
In the above photo, the dense beach grass is in the foreground (photos were taken without flash, in low-light conditions), and I continued to work on all the buildings.
This is the finished painting. It was only when I took the painting into the brighter greenhouse that I saw how 'textured' the sky had become! Ah well. I enjoyed delving into my paintbox again, and as this is the first landscape-with-buildings I've ever painted in oil, I feel that I learned plenty. My favorite part of the painting? The house to the far right!
Below: the photo I worked from.
Jocelyn Curry 
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