Path to the Beach (Oil Bar Painting Day 3)

Path to the Beach (Oil Bar Painting Day 3)
Originally uploaded by randubnick

Here is my oil bar painting in progress as it looked after I worked on it today. This view of a path to the beach is based on a photo that I took here in Beverly, at Lynch Park. (You can my reference photo, posted here on April 15.) Now that the basic shape of the path was in place, today my goal was to soften and break up the borders between the path and the vegetation, in order to show the incursions of sand into grass and grass into sand. As I worked, I tried to figure out what makes a path read as "sandy" when we look at it. This is an interesting problem to me, because I don't have much experience painting sand. (I'm from Colorado and still see the ocean as exotic.) I tried to suggest a little texture on the path, and I also worked on the vegetation in the foreground to try to make it relate to the path. And then it was time to stop for the day.