Sunlight and Storm Clouds (Oil Bar Painting as of June 30, 2013)

Sunlight and Storm Clouds (Oil Bar Painting as of June 30, 2013), a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

This is my oil bar painting (work in progress) as it looked yesterday. This landscape is roughly based on a photo that I took recently at Obear Park here in Beverly, MA. (If you want to see the reference photo, it is posted here June 19.) Yesterday I began to add more color to the water, and I really struggled to figure out what the colors should be. After a lot of trial and error, I came up with dark green for the water close to the land (reflected shore) and teal green for the rest of the water. (I mixed dark green with periwinkle to come up with the color). I am using periwinkle for the reflections of the sky on the surface of the water. This is all very complicated and I have gotten lost in this more than once! Painting water is very hard for me. At one point, I realized I was losing the yellow streaks in the water, so I used a straightedge to find the lines again. I worked for over an hour and stopped here because I got it to a point where I was happy with it so far. But there is more to do: the green band of reflected shore is not showing up well and the yellow streaks of light are far too bright and need to be integrated with the rest of the water. To be continued. . . .