Carmel Bay~ Start to Finish

In 2010, the US Open Golf Tournament was held at Pebble Beach in California.  While watching the 4 rounds, this scene was shown prior to most of the commercial breaks.  The Big Sur coast and Carmel Bay is just beautiful and I wanted to paint it.  So I grabbed the sketch book and while watching the golf, sketched the coastal view over the 4 days.

(My sketch didn't copy very well....I don't do detailed value thumbnail sketches.)

Once I got the basic composition worked out, I chose my color palette for the painting. Over the years, I have made and accumulated a lot of color reference swatches.  I used the following swatches to choose the palette for this painting.

I chose the sky color (windsor blue and pthalo blue), the ocean colors(cobalt teal and ultra turquoise), the rock combinations( all the different umbers and violets), the colors for the sand(buff titantium) and trees (several combinations of blues and quinacridine gold) and shrubs.  Usually,  I would put all of these choices on one sheet of paper for reference while painting and then keep it with the sketch for future reference.

I also look through my library of art books to get ideas for the different effects that I may want to create.  For this painting, I needed to review wave action so I looked through lots of seascapes.

I referred to this image for rocks, foamy water and wave action.

I faintly sketched the horizon line, then the trees and rocks coastline. Then, as I always do when I start a landscape, I put in the sky and clouds first.



Then I lay the first wash of the sea, rocks, beach and trees, shrubs and foliage.

I continue to layer on color, creating the light and dark areas.  For this painting, I got this far and got stuck. The background is not too bad but the foreground looks very pale and undefined, I didn't like the water color and I wasn't sure how to proceed.  I was liking what I had so far and didn't want to mess it up...BUT I didn't know what it needed or what to do next.  So I put on top of my bookcase and studied it ....a lot!

I wanted this area of the water meeting the beach to be foamy.

After a week or so, I decided to take a photo of the unfinished work and send it to my art teacher, Dani Tupper; asking her to critique it and offer suggestions.

"Carmel Bay"

This is the finished painting.  (It's pretty obvious that it is definitely a better photograph.) The sky is the same.  I changed the color of the water by glazing with different shades of turquoise so that there would be more of a color difference between sky and water.  The foamy rush of sea to shore is created with negative painting and also adding white gouache (This is where the reference photo was most useful).  Adding the purple to the beach, suggesting wet sand, provided the contrast of water meeting the beach.  Dani suggested deepening the values of the rocks and having them less detailed in the foreground so that your eye would travel down towards the point where the rocks meet the water.  I removed some of the deep greens in the background trees and shrubbery.  I also scrubbed out the sandy paths between the rocks leading down to the beach creating the needed value contrast.

When I posted this painting on Fine Art America, I received a comment from a Californian saying that this was exactly how it looked....I thought that was the best compliment.