Maasvlakte - sunset 3

 

During our walk by the shoreline at the Maasvlakte a few weeks ago I made a lot of reference pictures of the setting sun and I have already painted some watercolours. I did not make all the pictures standing up a bit from the waterline, I also made some pictures with a lower viewpoint, as low as I could get in a comfortable way (I wanted to stay dry and I had to get up without too much help) and for this watercolour I used one of those pictures.

There are some sandbanks a bit further away and these are only distinguishable from this point of view because there are no ripples. These sandbanks are not covered with water but very wet (almost quicksand) and they reflect the sunlight even better than the seawater around them.

The sun is almost touching the horizon and where the water is shallow the reflection of the sunlight is beautiful. The dark shapes are the waves rolling in, in backlight. I was crouching on a sandbank so there was water all around me - I did not want the beach to be visible in the reference picture.  After making a few pictures we had to leave, the sand was still too wet to hold us for a long time.

The painting is inspired by the reference picture and my memories of that walk so it is not an exact copy of reality (that's why it is a painting). 

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

Maasvlakte - Sunset 2

 

Last week we (my husband and me) went to see the sunset at the nearest beach, the Maasvlakte (Netherlands) and I have already painted a watercolour after the reference pictures I had made and made a blog post about that painting and a small description of the landscape we found there.

This scene is as the sunset was seen from the dunes, where we sat down for a while to find some shelter from the wind. From that relatively high spot I made several pictures which showed a very broad view of the landscape because I used my phone, which has a wide angle lens. The advantage of this is that I can select any part of the picture for my painting as these pictures are very high quality - so 'zooming in' causes no problems with losing the high definition of the image.

For this painting I was inspired by the sunset colours (no surprise here), not only in the sky and the reflections in the water, but also on the sand of the dunes. In broad daylight the sand is almost white, but in these light conditions even the sand had a red colour which I like very much. I enjoyed it to paint this and find the right colour because there was also a shadow on the sand, cast by the single line of beachgrass that we passed on our way to a soft spot to sit down. 

The footsteps show we were not the first to find a resting place in that area during that day. These footsteps are softened a bit in the painting, because they are not my subject, but do make the composition more interesting. 

As the tide was retreating there still was a lot of water between the sandbanks forming little streams catching the last sunlight forming some very nice dark and light contrasts. In fact this is one of the things that made me choose this part of the reference picture for my painting.

Compared to my previous painting, the sunset colours are all more yellow-orange, that is of course because the sun was still higher when I made the reference picture.

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

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.