The Old Luggers online Academy of Marine Painting

This page will be used to develop and complete the painting. We'll make a few more preliminary sketches and then maintain a commentary on what's happening at each stage of the work - colours used, mixing notes etc. with as much self criticism as we can stand and comments from you - whether we can stand them or not -within reason!

		Left: This is the sketch from lower right first page. The original panorama has been cropped too much. Worse still I've squeezed the elements to fit the space - the foreground figure is right on the margin and Lurline has moved to the right losing the background of Signal Hill we need for the light/dark counterchange. On balance this looks more like a river than a bay. I'll make it a wider view.
Right: The same view now widened. While 'Lurline' is still centre left in the composition, we can now show her against Signal Hill - as well as adding a small lugger off her starboard quarter. Our foreground stevedore seems to have become Lloyds Agent - we'll settle his identity later. We can also try out some colour ideas with watercolour and chalk.

Here's our provisional composition with an all-over golden ochre wash -looking much yellower than I expected. However, this is only the underpainting intended to unify the finished trial. With the local colours over the top it should look better, and if it doesn't we can probably fiddle with it electronically why not.

Keen to show late afternoon sun catching the hill tops I've underworked the greens -making it look more like the Bay of Naples than St.Johns Newfoundland. Also, my effort to smudge in a bit of mist has left a hard line which appears as a distant ridge on the horizon! But the light/dark values look about right.

Colour notes: This is just a trial but it makes sense to record what we did. First we gave it an overall wash of golden ochre. The sky and parts of the water are prussian blue - note the ochre showing through in places. The hills are raw sienna brightened with cadmium yellow deep, vermillion and white on the tops. Note that traces of all sky and land colours are carried down into the water. Clouds and sails are raw sienna with white. The 'blacks' are made with cobalt blue and burnt umber. The mist is cobalt blue with alizarin crimson - well thinned with matt medium or water or both.

Before going for the final result I want to check some notes made earlier (below) about Lurline's sail and general configuration on entering St.John's.

As I've never berthed anything without engines larger than a 'Pirate' class dinghy, what is shown here is the product of surmise and informed guesswork. But, nothing daunted, our view of Lurline will show that the ship's boat has already been launched to handle eventualities. This may involve taking heaving lines ashore or even helping to pull on the bow or stern when aligning to the berth. On the final approach fore-mast sails may be 'backed-up' (turned into the wind) to cut or reduce the way.

Good painting is most often about what we leave out rather than put in but if we omit some detail for the sake of the picture the remaining shapes must be true to their underlying detail - like drawing people but not showing the bones.

Commenting on Lurline's final approach to the dock, mariner and marine artist David Large (www.seadragon.com) writes:

"Concerning docking larger vessels, it has been my experience that the wind direction has a great deal to do with how you approach a dock. Even with our Tuna Boats the wind played a large part in docking. Mostly in the afternoon the wind is blowing on shore because the land heats up, rises and draws cooler air from off of the ocean ( this is assuming that there are no significant high or low fronts coming in).
In your painting the vessel is heading towards the dock with the wind to
her port 1/4 stern, so the Captain would want to approach the dock with as
little sail as possible, only enough to keep good steerage. He also would
want to dock on the starboard side. There were times with our schooner
that there was sufficient wind that I could luff everything and let the wind on the hull and rigging drift the boat into the dock.."

The trial picture shows the approach in fairly light airs but even so there must be a case for reducing canvas - a sudden gust could wreak havoc at this stage! I've said that I'll leave one good squares'l deployed which can take way off the ship when brought up to wind.

This is our drawing for the finished painting - suitably tinted to banish blank canvas syndrome and also to establish light and dark areas as they will occur - but probably with a fair bit of adjustment.

In the trial run I was dismayed by how yellow it looked using the golden ochre but for this version I've gone back to the trusted raw sienna for staining the board. I'm using board cut to the size of my scanner by the way. The other colours are burnt umber, prussian blue and the smallest drop of deep violet - all applied with glaze medium. The general idea is to produce a period feel to the picture hopefully to make it seem contemporary with the event it depicts. I think modern retrospects of past events created with modern techniques often fail to produce the 4th dimension of deep time -I hope that makes sense.

The rash decision to paint this to fit my scanner had me struggling with the skills of the miniaturist - edges of razor blades, mapping pens and the fabled one-haired sable brush - I usually work 20 ins x 30ins.

The first job under the rough heading 'composition' could be to spot the differences with the sketch. Firstly the 'Lurline' looked too far left in the sketch and was also too small to have any hope of developing interesting detail and more importantly would not show up to best advantage against the bulk of Signal Hill. Advancing the ship on her course would have the dual result of moving her to the right and bringing her nearer. It worked out reasonably well. The large mooring bollard in the foreground (sketch) was a bit too obvious even for a 'Victorian' narrative painting so it went. The foreground figure was a bit off ballance. By folding his arms, posture was restored and the effect of a descending evening chill was enhanced aided by a raised collar and wood smoke rising from a homestead across the bay. I did promise to settle the identity of this figure. Lets say he's the Assistant Harbour Master walking the Harbour Master's dog. Other elements: another vessel is entering the narrows, this establishes distance and perspective. It also gives an idea of movement - where our ship was then and where it is now and the route it has taken - pseudo-animation as I called it elsewhere. Off to the right are a trading schooner and an ex-naval brig refitting. In general the composition has four main areas which we can examine separately: Sky, Background, Midground and Foreground. Lighting will be a topic on its own.

Sky : The sky is painted in prussian blue lightening into turquoise toward the horizon. The area of sea mist is from violet, cobalt blue and burnt umber worked into a thin glaze with gloss medium. Two bands of cloud cross the sky, the top well lit one is in white with added raw sienna and high lighted with small additions of cadmium yellow and vermillion and shadowed with the sea mist mixture. The unlit clouds are scrubbed in with a bristle brush also using the sea mist colour.

Background: The heights are worked with raw sienna on its own and mixed with cobalt blue for the greens and cobalt blue with cadmium yellow for brighter greens. Shadowing and modelling are achieved with burnt umber, blue and violet mainly in gloss medium glazes overlaying raw sienna - to maintain a bit of radiance through the gloom. The sea mist beginning to form at the base of the heights along the waterline is from white and coereleum blue in a thin glaze - this helps to provide a counterchange for the detail painted against it.

Midground: Black hulls are from burnt umber and cobalt blue. The sea colours are as for the sky and land but grayed down a bit for the colour lost in reflection.

Foreground: The boardwalk quayside uses thin glazes one over the other of colours used throughout the picture but aiming to give the effect of grained weathered lumber ie. finishing off with added white in some places but trying not to kill it! I'm only moderately pleased with my own effort.

LIGHTING: (note capital letters!) There is a preference in some quarters of modern painting to paint against the light. This puts elements of your picture in partial silhouette against the light, clearly perpendicular to the ground and nicely outlined by halos of light leaking from the lit but unseen face. This picture is 180 degrees different with full low level sun on the focus of interest - so that it will be well refelected in the water. Being a low level sun, areas of the picture can be in shade to produce bold contrasts with the objects in front of them. The foreground is in shade as in a theatre on the auditorium side of the footlights, introducing we hope a strong observer-identification effect. The tops of the barrels (salt cod for Oporto) are slightly lit to enhance their uprightness.

That's really all I should say. I hope this might give ideas for your own project. Let me know how you make out and if the work is compatible with what we're trying to achieve here we can make a link to it. E-mail: signals @oldluggers.co.uk