I love to see paintings when they are complete, framed and ready to show… but I really love to see how they started, how they progressed, what worked, what didn’t and the decisions that were made as a result.
Drawing is my first love, I find painting a much more challenging medium, so it really helps me to see the process behind the work and learn tips and techniques to help and inspire me.
Here’s a series of photos that I took when I painted ‘Lobster Pots of Lyme’. I chose the subject because it was complicated. I wanted to challenge myself to convey the shape/volume of the pots with strokes of paint. I liked the cropped composition, too. It felt like a cross between an abstract and a still life.
I used a very limited colour palette of acrylic paints; raw sienna, raw umber, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, paynes grey and white on a pebeo canvas panel. I used my own photograph for reference.
I roughed out the composition. then concentrated on adding the foreground areas. I painted the areas ‘inside’ the pots as abstracted shapes, looking at the ‘negative’ spaces between the ‘positive’ wicker structures. I worked on each pot individually, but kept coming back to the painting as a whole to check the colour choices and the light and shadow. Finally I added in a grey-ish background to anchor them.
Lobster Pots of Lyme. Bethany Moore 2016
Acrylic on canvas panel 40cm x 40cm
Bethany Moore Artist 