Yellow Sky

11x14" acrylic on canvas.

I had high hopes for this painting but it didn't turn out the way I wanted. Mostly because it just looks too ominous—I didn't really intend for the water to be so stormy. And it looks like whoever owns those rowboats probably drowned! Not the effect I was after.

There's also a "neither here nor there" aspect to it: it's sort of stylized, like the Sea Garden painting, which is where I got the inspiration for the sky and water colors, but then I think it's becoming too realistic with the waves breaking on the beach and the rowboats. I started out with a nice, loose movement in the sky, but couldn't maintain it when I got to the boats.



But I got some unintended practice with painting breaking waves. It's a little tricky to get the look of foam on the sand, and I can see that the little bit of purple shadow underneath the leading edge is very helpful.


I do LOVE the way the sky turned out. I'm dragging through the wet paint with a plastic fork—very high tech. I like the scratchy lines. This is something I'm still experimenting with; I'm going to try another implementation of it somewhere else.

This might be a canvas I paint over, I guess I'll sleep on it and see what I think later. It might be helped by painting a few people near the rowboats so it looks less like a crime scene.