The past few weeks have been hectic in our house, but I’m finally getting to spend some time in my studio. When I am at a loss as to what to paint, I return to the sea. So I am working on some beach scenes. These ones have big breaking waves. White foam.
White presents a challenge in watercolour as there is no white watercolour paint. You can use white goache or even acrylic, but the clearest white is the white of the paper itself. There are various ways of preserving it, but for a large painting like this I use masking fluid. I paint the white coloured masking fluid onto the white paper, where the foam is to be! Thats a bit tricky, as its difficult to see what you’re doing! Once done, I then have total freedom to splash on the blues and greens, with long strokes, blending the colours to achieve the feel of flowing water. When I peel off the masking fluid I have beautiful chrisp foam (as in this image).
I’m not finished yet though. The fact is … foam is not white. The foam on the beach casts a small shadow, I will put that in, and it also reflects the colours around it (especially the sky). I’ll spend most of the day tomorrow adding these touches, and also touching up the water itself, adding ripples and swirls.
See my waves at my next exhibition, in Tramore. It runs for all of October … more on that later.
