Sunday, March 15, 2015

Lake Erie

Acrylic painting of  lake erie from the observation tower at Erie Basin Marina
Lake Erie
Acrylic on archival Gessobord
5” x 7”
Chris Breier © 2015
The original painting is available.
This past summer I spent an afternoon at the Erie Basin Marina and I walked to the top of the observation tower to get a better view of Lake Erie. It’s the values that create the sense of depth and light in a seascape painting. I struggled with this at first but that’s normal; I had to get some colors down first before I could make a judgement about whether it was too light or dark.

Looking at the finished painting I noticed how I managed to mix the colors as I saw them instead of how I thought they should be. For example, the color for the road was mixed from warm and cool colors– orange and blue (with white). The results are livelier than if I had used a dull gray. The “whites” of the utility van in the foreground are actually shades of blue. Normally, I don’t like to include vehicles in my paintings but I like how these turned out, I kept the shapes simple and blocky.

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