I have playing around with shape and colour lately, reverting back to a my earlier approach when we first settled in France. I think I have said before that I feel I am getting stale with my realistic paintings, and have decided to continue exploring more abstract motifs, whilst retaining a recognisable image. I think this exercise will stand me in good stead anyway, when I go back to representational painting, a bit like proverbially cleaning my teeth and refreshing my palette.
I have some canvasses I bought a few years ago, with a view to making them into decorative screens, I only made one, so I thought I would use the rest for my next series of paintings. I like the panoramic shape, and this proportion works well for a series of sketches I have been doing, inspired by our canal holiday last autumn. These sketches are both in pencil and watercolour on paper and digitally on my wacom tablet, in the Sketchbook Express application. The format is 40 x120.
The sketches:
This B&W sketch :
became this colour one, the moon is missing so I must put that in:
Another colour sketch:
This B&W real pencil sketch became the following digital colour sketch:
pencil sketches not yet in colour, that’s my next task :
and a full size canvas in its infancy:
The painting is now an adolescent so I am leaving it alone for a bit! :
lizkingsangster 
looking good watch out it is a slippery slope
Oh dear, John, that sounds portentous!
Great post Liz. I love this wide, panoramic format but I sometimes find the composition a challenge – you have a natural compositional sense, though, and these images really work across the wide format and the colour studies are a joy. The painting you’ve started is looking rich and atmospheric already, bravo!
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Thanks Phil, such encouraging words, but I have always struggled with composition, (along with everything else,) I feel it is one of my many weaknesses. Partly because I can never make my mind up quickly, so I keep all options open. then if I concentrate on one weakness the others silently rear their ugly heads, well that’s the nature of the beast of our profession I guess!
I love them. Why would yo want to change them ?
Dear staunch friend, you know how I like to make my life difficult….and how I am always dissatisfied with what I do, but then being born under the constellation of Taurus, I keep charging again and again at that swirling red cape of unattainable satisfaction!xL
Really interesting post, Liz. Lovely to see your thought processes – and as for that adolescent painting, it looks fantastic just as it is.
Thanks for that Stewart, I am at the stage of ruining it which is why I set it aside. I have ideas of adding boats, or at least blocks of colour representing them, but now you make me wonder….. it’s reached that “making-up-my-mind-time”!
Stunning and I really enjoyed reading through the process.
Thanks Oonagh, I never know if it’s interesting enough to post, however, it’s a good way of archiving my work and life for my own personal use, even if nobody else reads it!xL
Love this range of color and the composition is so dynamic!👏👏👏🔺