Boats in the Harbor

I noticed that I have been painting lots of overcast and blue-er skies mostly and so today I wanted to push away from that for a bit and go into some more late afternoon colors. Out in the harbor from where I live lobster boats rock around in the gentle sway of the ocean. In the later afternoon they will catch the light from the sun in a very cool way and create very stark shapes out there. In my imaginative version I wanted to try and tell a little story of the two boats passing by and making small talk.

I guess you could say that these were a little bit more of a composition simplification exercise. There are lots of things to balance when approaching a painting and sometimes I lose sight of some of the elements that make up a nicely balanced picture. In this one I really wanted to keep everything super simple so that the composition would remain very obvious. I did a greyscale version first and tried my best to stick to the rules I created for it. I've been watching a number of tutorial videos recently and I've been starting to come around to the idea of making a daily practice out of just sketching compositions. The stronger images seem like they have a nice balance of shapes, big medium and small. Also a balance of hard and soft edges as well as detailed zones and areas where detail fall off. There's a lot to think about. I may have to make a little checklist at some point so that I can test my paintings before calling them finished.

And the journey continues.... All the best!