Boats on Spa Creek

Boats on Spa Creek, oils on canvas panel, 11" x 14." Contact artist for price.

This Friday our class met at a different location. Lee wanted us to deal with a more complicated subject this week and boats, whose geometry is always challenging to draw, seemed the best way to kick up the difficulty one notch. He led us to Spa Creek, to an inlet where this beautifully kept-up old tug boat was moored. Of course, there were lots of other boats everywhere (we're in Annapolis after all) so judicious editing was called for.

The class spent the first hour just doing a pencil drawing and Lee corrected our drawings, explaining the subtleties of getting a realistic look to the boat's hull lying on the water. The day had started out overcast and cool, but the sun began to break through the clouds as we started to paint, and it soon got very hot and muggy. I regretted wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt.

I kept my color key to the cloudy, overcast atmosphere, since that had already been established at the beginning. But I spent so much time on the landscape around my boats that there was not enough time left to work on the tug boat. I would have liked more time to get the color of the hull and the reflections on the water truer, as well as other details of the boat, but by that time my brain was totally fried by the heat and I was ready to call it quits--it was an hour past the end of the class. We're going back to the same spot next week, so there will be a chance to try this again.