Video: Water Base Layer in a Seascape Oil Painting

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Painting seascapes always requires a water base layer. Learn water painting techniques with expertise from an experienced artist in this free oil painting video.

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Video Transcript

Now we're going to move on to our water. Now recall last time on the sky is predominately a white color and a little bit of blue. This time it's going to be reversed. It's going to be majority blue and a little bit of white in here. We don't want super, super strong blue. Now that may be the way the water looks in the cartoons but it's not the way it looks in real life. So let's make sure and have paler blue still but not nearly as pale as the sky. That said, imaging if you're painting the interior of a house the sky and the ocean will be very related. Just the sky will be a little less intense. More faded than the blue. We have plenty of pigment to add in here to thin out our base layer on the water. One of my strategies in painting water is to try to kind of be chaotic. At least for this first base layer. I'm just, hear that? It's making noise because I'm hitting the canvas hard. I want my brushes to be uneven, be a little more chaotic. This is not calm water. There are waves in it. I'm not even evenly applying the layer. There are some of these thin spots back here. That's fine. I don't like evenly applying a layer of water, not even for the base layer. I like there appearing like gaps. It gives it a depth. It gives it a rolling. One might say a wave like feeling to it. So continue this. You can see how this blue relates to but is different than the sky blue. It's less, more intense. There's more blue pigment here. The other thing is to make sure that you are bringing the water all the way up to the horizon line. And this is the only time where I basically say maybe let up on the harder strokes and make sure you have a nice straight horizon line. Because water in the distance, for the human eye, it looks straight. So make sure it's not here at an angle, unless you have a tsunami coming in, and maybe that's what you're painting, but odds are, you're not. So make that horizon line nice and straight. There's a bit of a border here but it's also going to be fading out as it gets to the distance. So, don't make it where it's like white and pink and then stark blue. It's not going to be that solid of a line. But there should be the impression that we have a nice straight edge here.

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Water Base Layer in a Seascape Oil Painting

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