A summer’s painting letter
July and August 2024
Hello there,
I hope you are doing fine. I decided to compile these past two months in one chunk of letter and I hope this find you well.
This summer I went to London for the exhibition I participated in, got to teach two painting workshops, went to the beach and painted/drew some. I’ve put together some pleinair setup with gouache (for traveling or painting on the go) and I did lots of research about how to make your gouache painting chunky and shiny (don’t have an answer yet, although I did use some Aquapasto from Winsor and Newton, and it was kind of nice) I was wondering if gouache could be a nice medium for a minimal travel setup. So I bought a new smaller leakproof container for the water and a new pad of hot pressed watercolor paper in A4 size from Saunders Waterford (I loved it!) I have this, also leakproof, sealed small palette for keeping my gouache wet and I had some help to build a tray for my tripod. I haven’t tried this setup on pleinair yet but I would love to. From my travels to UK and Spain I found that I couldn’t even translate the same atmosphere from what I was experiencing from direct observation, once at home. I tried my best at painting the subjects at home but, both times, I wished I had my paintings with me (oils, acrylics or gouache) to paint there.
From these experiences, I did take immense pleasure of sketching in my sketchbook and I found myself studying two different subjects this summer. I drew and painted the same subject over and over again. I need to do that sometimes. Usually using different mediums. Here I share with you a seascape I worked on multiple times:
This is the final painting that I did on this subject: an oil paint seascape from the south of Spain. I painted this by adding some viridian to my usual color palette, to make the water pop a little bit more. There is some shades of blue-green I find difficult to achieve using only my limited color palette and adding viridian was a very nice solution. What a pleasure. I painted this alla prima on Canson oil paper. I loved it.
I would love to show you the rest of the works of this painting.
The only sketch I did of it on location was the one in my sketchbook. I forgot to take a picture, so every form and color came from that sketch and from memory. In this video I am drawing this subject.
I am sharing my work regularly on Patreon, you can join me there for 1€/month to have access to a 30+ video process and regular posts about what I am working on.
Thank you so much to all my patrons ❤️
I hope you enjoyed this summer’s painting letter! You can find me on Instagram, Youtube and Patreon. If you want to commission a painting and or you are interested in learning with me, please contact me via email or leave me a message :)
I hope you have a nice day,
See you soon.
Elena.
Gosh your work is something else! I adore seeing your images, so inspiring 💕