Instructions for Painting Oceans on Seascapes
How you paint an ocean within a seascape depends on what you, the artist, see. You can best learn how to paint an ocean through close observation of water, noticing its continual movement and the color and light reflected upon its translucent surface. Through practice and application you will come to adopt your own palette of colors, as well as your own painting methods and techniques.
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Things You'll Need
- Canvas
- Acrylic or oil paints
- Water
- Beaker
- Palette
- Cloth
- Brushes
- Turpentine or acrylic retarder
- Pencil, HB or #2
- Putty eraser
- Artist knife
- Ruler
- Camera (optional)
Instructions
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Go to the coast to observe a natural seascape to paint. Take photographs to use later in the studio if you would like.
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Prepare your paint palette. Place your choice of acrylic colors or oils around your palette by squeezing out small dabs. Start with the lightest and move to the darkest hue, ranging from yellow to green shades. Include Titanium White on your palette.
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Apply a warm yellow-orange wash over your canvas as an under-painting. If you want a thinner wash to make the color more transparent or to paint quick-drying acrylic more quickly, you can thin the paint with turpentine or an acrylic retarder. Leave to dry.
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Draw a rough outline of your seascape in pencil or paint to guide you through your composition, especially with wave formations. Use a ruler to draw your horizon. It must be straight, as water seeks to be level.
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Paint the sky white. Mix hues like Ultramarine Blue or Cerulean Blue with a dab of Prussian Blue and Titanium White to create a light blue. Paint the blue mix over the sky, blending it into the white beneath. Allow the paint to get lighter as it reaches the horizon. Add paint thinner if necessary, to lighten the mix and make it more transparent.
It is good working practice to apply color to the canvas starting at the top before working your way methodically down to the bottom. This aids spontaneity and helps you to blend one color into another more smoothly.
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Paint the horizon line with a mix such as Viridian, Ultramarine Blue and Titanium White and thin it down with turpentine. To indicate the horizon, paint a boat sailing, a distant lighthouse or both.
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Use the same blue that you used for the sky to paint the ocean. The darkest blue will be under the horizon, where the deepest water is, and the blue should get lighter as it shallows toward the sandy shoreline, which is painted using thinned-down orange and yellow ochre.
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Use darker mixes of blues and greens to add darker tones into your water and the wave formations. Observe the colors in the ocean, which will help you place the dark areas under and behind the white spray of foam of the waves.
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Paint in the white spray of the waves to bring the ocean to life. Using your brush in a horizontal, skipping, zig-zag motion to paint in the white spray in Titanium White. Drag some of the white down horizontally to create the downward motion of the spray.
Keep adding lights and darks to your ocean while paying attention to the reflective quality of water, which will pick up light reflections from the sky.
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Tips & Warnings
Be experimental in your approach and don't be afraid to use a range of different strokes and colors. Paint what you see. Use a range of brushes such as flat, filbert, round and blender. Bigger brushes are good for covering larger areas of the canvas, the filbert and blender brushes are good for creating softer blending effects and the round brush is good for creating finer details in your seascape.
References
- Photo Credit watercolour painting 3 image by Pontus Edenberg from Fotolia.com
