Morning at the beach

Another of my seashore paintings with reference to the beaches at Florida. I added a little warmth to the sands in the foreground before painting the shadows. The sand dunes help in creating a dramatic composition. 

Presently I am continuing to use the Camel artist's colour tubes but have plans to use my old collection of Winsor and Newton cotman colours too as some of them are drying up. Also the plan is to shift to Arches paper as it has more water holding capacity and is an acid free paper.

Morning at the beach

Water colour painting on hand made paper

Size 6"X 9"

I somehow feel comfortable painting on a common size such as 6" X 9". This kind of an arrangement helps because in future if I have to frame some of my works then I can go and buy Frames of a common size which adds to the convenience. Moreover this size is very easy to store in a Folder.

The morning glow - Soft pastel painting from my reference photogdraph

While we were in Coorg in May 2010, we stayed in a beautiful Homestay which was built on a small hill from where we had a great all around. Basically the Homestay was part of five acre coffee plantation which had whole lot of other trees too growing there. To get to the coffee plantations we had to climb on few rocky steps and dry bushes and once there we walked around looking for subjects to photograph. Insects, birds, dry leaves, the landscape around in general.

The soft pastel painting below is of the pathway which led to the coffee plantations and the morning glow through the dried bushes was captured by my son. I have cropped the photograph to get a good composition. I enjoyed doing this particular painting and spent a little longer time than usual as it had some new elements in it to be tackled.

The Morning Glow

Soft Pastel Painitng

© Manju Panchal