Last summer, I was thrilled to spend some time camping along the north shore of Lake Superior, not far from the rocky point shown above you can read about my trip at Exploring Lake Superior - At Last. I came home with an extensive collection of reference photos to inspire new paintings. The combination of a world-class variety of colourful rocks and stones and extremely clear water makes for awesome painting subjects.
I have completed several excellent pieces, and described some of my painting processes in these articles The Superior Paintings Begin and The Making of 'Listen to the Lake'.
The scene above is in Rainbow Falls Provincial Park Rossport and was the subject of a three day advanced workshop I taught in my Lindsay studio. Shown below are the steps involved in capturing this scene in a watercolour painting.
There is also a short video of part of the early painting process. After drawing the scene in pencil on lb cold press watercolour paper above , I used masking fluid to mask out the twigs and leaves of the shrubbery and the three small rocks sticking out of the water.
This temporary protective coating preserved the white paper for a later painting stage. Then I painted a layer of warm gray in the reflection of the far point. I mixed blue and gray washes below , using test strips of watercolour paper to verify the colours were accurate to my reference photo.
