First lay in of color

[Alexandra Tyng]

Patty,

Why are you embarrassed? There's no need to be.

The ocean near the shore is rising up into waves. Every time a wave begins to form, you will see the "underbelly" of the water, i.e. the color of the sand bottom. The deeper the layer of water over the sand bottom, the more the sand color will be dominated by the water color.

Farther out, the water is deeper and reflects the sky. Though the sky is blue, there is a cloud bank. The water is a deeper blue than the sky. But because there is a haze of cloud, the blue of the water is tinged with shadow. To nail the color, try mixing just a tiny bit of cad orange into the blue and lightening the value with white.

The same mixture of ult. blue + cad orange (only a tiny bit of color needed--balance to make a cool grey and mix with a lot of white) can be used to make the underside of the cloud. There is this direct relationship between the cloud in shadow and the water in shadow. The front top edge of cloud that is catching the sunlight from behind should be white plus the color of the light (a clear yellow rather than yellow ochre which is an earth tone).

Hope this helps a bit. There are other ways to do it, but this is how I would approach it.

[Patricia Joyce]

Alexandra,
I am printing up your advice as well, and will play with these combinations as well.
You are a great help with your knowledge about clouds, sea, shadows, waves. I need all of this having never taken a landscape painting class. To be honest, this is my first landscape in more years than I want to count...

[Allan Rahbek]

Patricia,
to make it easy I will suggest that you paint the sky and sea first, before the children, and keep the values light, in the upper third of the value scale.

[Debra Norton]

Patty, I think it's looking great so far! At first glance my eye had to travel over the sand to get to the children, which shows depth already!

One thing I would encourage you to do is work on the children the same time you're working on the surroundings. My teacher called this "working a passage." She would draw an imaginary circle (like I've tried to do on your picture - hope it worked) around an area and say "paint inside the circle." Then she'd "draw" another circle somewhere else and say the same thing. And if you keep "painting inside the circle" you end up with a unified painting and avoid a cut out look. When you paint inside the circle you paint everything at once, rather than painting the individual objects. It took me a long time to understand this concept myself and I hope I've explained it in a way that makes sense.

[Patricia Joyce]

Thank you Debra,
I will try that today. It is Saturday and I have a whole day AND tomorrow afternoon - will be posting my progress....

[Patricia Joyce]

I am posting before I paint today with a question about the boy's face. The photo reference has no more detail than what I have painted. How can I made the face more present? I'm stumped...

Thank you
Patty

[Patricia Joyce]

here's a closeup of the kids. Everything is still very unfinished. i want to made the kids the true center of attention...

[Alexandra Tyng]

Patty, can you post a closeup of the reference photo and even an extreme closeup of just the boy's face, even if it is blurry? This might help with generating some suggestions.

Sometimes if I have to work from bad references I enlarge them a lot even if they are not detailed. It helps to look at a very large image to see how I might interpret the information that I have.

I'm wondering what the client expects. I think that even with little detail you can make a successful figurative piece with painterly touches of color and light. Maybe this would be fine with your client. But next time, you might want to think out the size relevant to the information in the photo, and talk to the clients beforehand.