The Moonlit Sea

I found another Shin Hanga print I really like. It’s by an artist called Koho Shoda. It really only has one colour and black and white. Here’s the original Japanese woodblock print…

I wanted to create something along the same lines but with a well known English boat as the main subject and in watercolour and gouache. I don’t live very far from Maldon where some traditional Thames Sailing Barges have their moorings. I think there’s also a repair yard in Maldon for these beautiful boats. I spent some time in my teens sailing on the Blackwater, very occasionally alongside these wonderful boats. They are so big that they’re a little scary to be near when you’re in a small sailing dingy, but they still retain the grace and beauty of a sailing vessel. Maybe coots feel the same way about swimming near swans!

(Wikipedia Photo of two Thames Sailing Barges going East on the Blackwater near Bradwell Power Station. By Terry Joyce)

I began with a wash using a mixture of French Ultramarine and Phthalo blue…

Then I painted on more details with gouache…

I did quite like the picture at this stage. It had an open feel. But I went ahead and added the foreground reeds…

Reviewing my picture at this stage I quite liked the contrast and the reflections but I very much disliked the ultramarine sky – it felt too warm and too saturated for the sea below it. To give you an idea what it might look like with the hue shifted towards green and away from red and the saturation dropped a bit I manipulated it in Photoshop. This is how I wish I had painted it…

I think this looked closer to what I wanted but it wasn’t there yet.

I was painting this in the last week of the Spring Term and was really tired so I was temped to leave it there, but every time I looked at the original, still taped to my board, it annoyed me. In the end, on the Thursday before the end of term I decided to do something drastic. I got a big paint brush I had bought for my son to use in painting the bathroom and used it to add a phthalo blue / ultramarine glaze over the top of everything. Then I worked the paper with water to blur much of what I had already painted. The gouache which I had used mixed with the watercolour and helped the paint to move and it really changed. In fact it really looked like a big dark mess, so much so that I went to bed in disgust!

However, today, the first day of the Easter Holiday, I saw it dry and still taped to my board. It’s amazing what eyes which have had 12 hours of sleep can do! I repainted all of the details and followed my heart’s feeling for the picture. Finally I had a painting I like!

Here is the finished picture…