Commissioned painting from beginning to end

Here's another series of photos showing the work in progress of a painting that was commissioned as a gift for Christmas.

I purposefully started off with a mess because, 1. it stops me getting precious about the painting; 2. it shows me where the light and shade is going to be; 3. it creates a thick undercoat for the main paint on top, so that it doesn't look thin and washy. This undercoat is acrylic, but it's going to be oils on top. Acrylic is a bit more predictable, plus it doens't absorb into the canvas like oil paints do. You know when you get cooking oil on your clothes, and there's a big smudgy, oily mess that you can't get rid of? Well that's what the back of a canvas with no undercoat looks like, and it's not nice!

This next undercoat is oils; spot the difference?! There isn't much, I admit. I suppose it looks smoother than the acrylics. Lots of low odour thinner is used here (a bit like turps but without the stink) so the oil spreads in a thinner layer.

Now it gets a bit more interesting with detail in the sea; I always start from the top down, sky then sea then sand then figures, it just makes the layering easier. The thick oil paint works well here to make some nice frothy type waves, plus the same colours are used to suggest the puddles in the foreground.

More work on the figures and sand continues; a bit more blue here, a bit more brown there; it's a balancing act. But at this point we realise there's a continuity error! The figures in the distance have thick winter coats on, but the foreground figure is in shorts and tshirt, it doesn't add up. Problem is I was working from two different photos, and this is where things can start to go wrong when you composit them together.

So we gave him a coat, and I altered the angle of his legs, and here we have the finished image. Happy days. There's a bit of shine on the photo, the canvas is quite big, one meter wide by 80cm high, so it's hard to fit it all in without some of it catching an angle of light. I'll post some close ups on the next post.