Plein air painting on Barricane Beach,Woolacombe, Devon

 There is something so calming about setting your painting kit up on the beach. Lisa Igo was booked in for a one day painting workshop, so we chose the secluded location of Barricane Beach in Woolacombe , Devon for our day's painting.

 We started out with a quick exercise in Notan sketching in oil, literally a few minutes quick sketching in a dark mix of Ultramarine Blue and Alizarin Crimson. A great way to assess the the masses and dark and light in your composition.

Next we pre-mixed a swatch of the various colours and tones from our setting, using the limited palette of Ultramarine Blue, Phthalo Blue, Alizarin Crimson, Cad Red Light, Cad Yellow Light , Phthalo Green and Titanium White, this proved really helpful as the light continued to change throughout the day, and our palettes got more and more worked on., we could refer back to the swatches for colour matching.

 The first two studies that we painted in the morning were painted onto a dark almost black undertone that I had prepared the night before. This gave a useful step along from the Notan studies allowing us to block in colour and light , leaving the dark masses as undertone.

 After a beach lunch of pasty and tea, we worked on a set time limit of approx 45 minutes to capture the next study of sunlight breaking through the clouds and lighting up the sea in front of us.
We used a different format panel and an orangey brown undertone , to help capture the warmth that the afternoon light brought. These were great fun to do and the resulting little oil studies were loose and vibrant.

A great day painting plein air at the beach that we both enjoyed!

As Winter draws in we were lucky to get such a pleasant and calm day. I look forward to sneaking a few more such days in when Mother Nature chooses to share them with us.

Have a great day!