Towards the Beach: Concept Drawing

The next painting will be one of the smaller paintings (11 x 14) and more along the lines of an impressionistic landscape. In this scene, we have the water coming up to a beach and some trees/mountains in the background. The foreground contains grassy fields and rocks.

As usual, the first part of the painting is to layout various concept sketches to decide how the abstract shapes interact with the landscape. When doing this, there are two approaches: 1) Draw the land and then incorporate the shapes or 2) draw the shapes and incorporate the land. The last painting (Reaching Upward) dealt with the shapes being drawn first and then the mountain added to it. In this situation, the land is more important than the unique shapes, so I'll work based on incorporating the shapes into the land.

In the first drawing, we see that it is a pretty standard landscape scene with various rounded shapes at different points. since I want the beach to be the primary focus area, that shape will be the brightest/strongest. Most likely, it will be a nice yellow, which contrasts strongly with the bluish-grey water.

The second drawing uses various dark and solid colors blocks to "frame" out the landscape. The blocks will not be much different in value from the land, with the exception of the one near the beach.

The final drawing incorporates the shapes directly into the landscape and makes them a part of the landscape. This is definitely the most interesting use of the shapes. I think that this will be the primary painting.