Commissioned

Here is a commission I recently finished. It was a wife's gift to her husband, their favorite path to the lake from their cottage.


To the Lake, oil, 14" x 20"

And here are some work-in-progress images. I generally follow the usual rules of oil painting, thin to thick, dark to light. On a warm-toned canvas, I begin with a transparent wash-in of the composition with Alizarin and a little Ultramarine blue, establishing the dark values still with semi-transparent paints before moving to opaques. In a scene like this, I work for the most part foreground to background, so I can cut-in around object to define their shapes. But I like to bring up the whole painting at once as much as I can to make sure it holds together and doesn't end up looking like a paint-by-number. Rocks, sand, foliage, water, and sky.