Just after the winter holidays we took a drive out to the Pacific Coast of the Olympic Peninsula, to see some sea stacks. Amazing views. I took a ton of pictures, went back to my studio, and mounted a 24x30" cradled board on my newly-acquired Artristic Evolve.
As I usually do, I painted an acrylic transparent earth yellow as a ground,
and drew in the picture with white chalk.
I changed the composition just a bit, running more water through the foreground.
Next, I laid in the sky with quick-dry titanium white, and a touch of phthalo
torquoise, increasing the phthalo torquoise as I got closer to the earth.
Then I mixed into the leftover sky some quinacridone magenta, for the distant stacks.
I always do my skies first, because I then save the leftover sky color into whatever
else I'm painting, creating some color harmony.
I started on the rocks with a mixture of raw sienna, quinacridone gold,
and mixed into that varying amounts of quinacridone magenta and anthroquinone blue
I've been working gradually on shifting my palette toward high-lightfast,
synthetic and non-toxic pigments, partly because I have a septic system and
don't want to dump heavy metals like cadmium and cobalt into it.
Also, they have really high chroma, meaning that a little goes a long way.
I've focused mainly on quinacridone and related pigments, and phthalos.
It's been a learning journey. They are tricky to work with and you can wind
up with some really weird color mixes.
Back at my panel, I started laying in some of the optical mixing
in the sea - it is almost violet where the water is shallow and the
sand shows through. I also mixed a color for the exposed sand on the left.
I laid i more blue around the ocean parts.
Moving back and forth with my palette knife between varying shades of blue
to get that optical mix I've been chasing.
Darker blue for the stack's shadow on the right
I let it sit for a couple days while I decided whether I wanted the trees on top.
In the end, I decided to put them there because they provide scale for the outcropping.
Although I didn't photograph it, I taped the back inch of the sides so that the
composition wraps around the edges about a centimeter.
Then I put shadows on the sides of the trees away from the sun
Later, I did a watercolor version (with micron pen):
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