Path to the Beach (Oil Bar Painting Day 1)

Path to the Beach (Oil Bar Painting Day 1)
Originally uploaded by randubnick

This morning I started another oil painting, working from a reference photo that I took back in the summer of 2007, a view of a path to the beach at Lynch Park, here in Beverly, MA. (Yesterday I used Painter to created a posterized version of the photo and published it here.) This morning, I planned to begin by printing out a copy of the reference photo from my computer, but the printer's nozzle for blue ink was clogged, so I got a print-out of the photo with only red, green, and yellow. A little basic printer maintenance allowed me to print the 'full-color version' five minutes later. But I also kept the first "problem" version because I can use it as an aid to color analysis later on. Before I even started, I knew I wanted to change the photo's composition for this painting, not just to get it into a square format, but to make some minor placement adjustments. So I was folding the printout and drawing on top of it till I knew what I wanted to do. When I was ready, I picked up a gray oil bar and sketched in a basic composition on the canvas. I used my T-square with the oil bar to make some corrections, and kept making lines with dark and light gray paint. When I started to get lost, I added some color to make it easier to see what I was doing, but I wasn't worrying too much about whether the colors were "right" or whether the shapes were completely accurate. I was just trying to establish basic placement of shapes. I worked for about an hour and got the composition roughed in. I can already see lots of things that I want to modify, but I had a good time and I am glad I got this painting started.