Harbour Scenes

I've tried a few marine harbour scenes recently. It's tricky trying to draw accurately while still keeping it loose. These are from yesterday. I was delighted to be able join two other painter colleagues for the day in the little coastal villages of Duncannon and Arthurstown. It helped also that the day was warm and sunny!

In the morning scene, I was attracted to the old fishing boat in the inner harbour. I also liked how the slightly opaque water in that area of the harbour provided both shadows and reflections. I forgot to take a photo of this scene, but I made very few changes to what I was looking at. I just edited out a lot of the junk (boxes, pallets, etc) beyond the boat, brought the background shadow area down somewhat to frame the cabin of the boat, and moved the floating buoys into the scene from the left, making sure that one of them was set off by the cast shadow of the boat.

After lunch, we drove a couple of miles to Arthurstown, where I painted the second one. The tide had gone out leaving the boats stranded on wet silt, so the reflections were fairly subdued. Other than the boat, what really caught my eye was the nice background light and the blueing of the distant landmass. I remembered to take a photo of the scene this time. Again, I did only limited editing to the scene, just moving stuff around a little for compositional reasons.