Maasvlakte - sunset

 

For my husband and me Summer vacation has already started as we don't have to go to work when the children don't go to school. This means we have time to go to the beach to see the sunset when the weather permits. Yesterday evening was one of those moments. The air was warm, not hot, the sky was blue and there was nothing urgent to do the next day so the alarm could be set a bit later than on a workday. From our home it is almost an hour drive to the nearest beach and sunset was to be around 21.43 hrs. 

We went to the beach at the Maasvlakte, not exactly a place to go with children that want to play in the sand, but the sunset is as beautiful from that beach as it is from any other place. After parking the car we walked over the line of dunes and started walking, making pictures while we were on the way. When we reached a beautiful spot we waited for the sunset and made more pictures (no surprise here). As the tide was outgoing, there were lots of patches of water left on the shoreline, catching the sunlight and reflecting the colours of the sunset.

Today I picked one of these pictures to make a watercolour painting. As the sun was still visible in this scene I had to use masking fluid to make sure that this spot stayed as white as possible. I also masked the reflections on the water. Because of the use of the masking fluid, I could not speed up the drying process of the painting with my hairdryer so I had to wait for the colours in the sky were dry and hope they would not mix too much while the paint was still wet.

The foreground was also a bit of a challenge, with the reflected light in the water and the dark patches of sand that were left behind by the retreating water. Both water and sand were coloured by the sunset so I had to give them a light glaze without disturbing the first layers of paint too much.

After all had dried I had to remove the masking fluid and correct the white shapes so they would look like the kind of shapes that can be seen in a landscape.  

All that planning and correcting and adding and again correcting made me a bit too focused on the details so I had to walk away for a few minutes before I could see the painting I made as a whole. In fact I am really happy with the result.  Even though the reference picture has been my inspiration and guideline, the painting is not exactly how the scene looked yesterday. 

The information about the materials I have used, the size of the watercolour painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.