Placing bigger shapes on dunes

 

For the "dune" painting, I'm still trying to place bigger shapes on the dunes. 

The vegitation is the most difficult to determine the shapes without painting leaves. Yet want to make it look like vegitation. And the most importantly color shift and value shift need to be painted in right way even in this early stage, because it's all about this painting.

NorCal Seagull

 I actually started this paining probably close to a month ago. Haven't touched it a while until today.

Before start defining the shape of the main subject, obviously the gull, I wanted to determine the entire atmosphere, overcast ocean scene. The background is just thin underpainting but actually capturing the gloomy day quite well.

It was more than three years ago when I took this shot on my way driving back from Monterey, CA. I don't remember the exact place but I called the gull as "NorCal Seagull" that I remember, so not on Oregon coast.

Low Tide at Harper

 Due to COVID-19 this was my first painting trip this year. I painted at Harper, WA in low tide. I realized my drawing problem after came back and checked with my reference photos. I forgot to bring small sketch book to draw a thumbnail. Next time I will remember. The foreground was unproportionally stretched vertically, which doesn't match the background water and mountains.

New Dune Painting

Started new painting of dunes at Carmel-by-the-Sea. I tried painting there in earier afternoon a little more than two years ago, but didn't go well. This is from a photo I took at sunset that day.

I decided the composition then decided the size of canvas (22"x30"). But after I put the initial rough drawing to place the bigger shapes, I felt the size of sky was similar to sand. So went back to computer and re-cropped it to make sky smaller. I like this composition much better.

Finally, trying to finish "Cape Falcon"

I'm now finally trying to finish this piece. Still can't get rock colors as I want. So keep pushing around them. But I can feel it's near the end.
I'm also working on my new web site so I'm not sure when I can update there even when I finished this painting.

Paying attention to shapes and their edges

Not a big progress as usual. But defining edges of bigger shapes instead of smearing colors about the area of each shape, which wouldn't help giving myself a feeling of making progress.
Those shapes are probably way off from the real perspective but I don't care much at this moment.
Some point I have to graduate from that.

It's been a while since last update

It's been a while since last update for this Cape Falcon painting. But finally I came back to this today and focused on making the darkest/darker part properly dark.
The left side is still too dark but I'll push it down soon.