Sea vitality. – I Learn Painting

20*30 oil on stretched canvas April 2015.
I noticed that the sea has an incredible inner vital force, which one can feel instantly when even just looking at the sea water. I have been dreaming about capturing this phenomenon with oil paints. I have been looking for the right picture of the sea and came across this one:

This picture shows the wave in all its beauty. I already knew all the basics of creating a wave from previous online lessons by Igor Sakharov and decided to try to work on my own when I accidentally came across his youtube lesson on a very similar theme. I ended up cheating and doing partly online lesson, partly picture and also adding some of my own details 🙂

I spent a total of around 8 hours on this panting and realized i did not know all the basics 🙂 It turns out learning in painting is an infinite process. At least in my case ! And that is what this blog all about.

I started with a light blue underwash for the sky and darker version of the blue for the sea. My wave was not horizontal, but rather inclines, which added a level of difficulty (remember, i always struggle with geometrical arrangements?read more here). I had to scribble out the exact line of the wave to make it straight and leveled. I then was working with the sea only and finished the sky late at night and even continued the next day:

Adding curvy strokes with darker blue on top of the light blue underwash created the effect of distant waves. I later added some lighter blue and even greenish ones.

From the online lessons i remembered that the base of the wave is dark due to the thickness of water. From the very beginning I used circular strokes to create the movement direction of the water

It was a great pleasure creating those rocks again (like i did with this painting for instance). I came to conclusion that this is such a playful experience when you just create different strokes without any intentions and waiting for a good image to come. Seems like I am not even the part of the process – the rocks appear on their own!

I had some serious problems with the foam. At first i used too much of paint, which did not allow me to be able to adjust the resulting image. I had to shave away the layers several times till i finally got the right thickness. I also got a great tip from igro Sakharov about the three-layered nature of the foam: the thinnest shady one (blue and white or purple and white), the thicker white and the thick “lightened” foam (may be yellow+red+white or just yellow+white depending on the source of light).

It was entertaining to create the foamy waters by the rocks too. Very easy and fun!

Around midnight i decided to add sun and the light reflection on the water to the painting. It felt like the color scheme was too cold for me.

Thank you for looking! 🙂