Painting waves and ripples in lakes and river

The value of these blogs I believe is to help you understand how I paint and why I paint the way I do. In this blog I am thinking about how I paint water as in painting rivers lakes and ponds. I will deal with painting the sea in another blog.

            In order to paint water you really have to understand how to paint waves and how to paint reflections, which will be the subject of another blog. Its all about looking carefully and understanding what you see, painting plein air or in the studio, using photos and sketches. I personally like to work in the studio, where I can paint in comfort and I am not frustrated by the changes to what I see due to the changing passage of sun, changes in cloud cover and changes in the wind. Photos help me to capture the moment in time.

            A wave is essentially a lump in the water. It might be a long lump or a  short spiky lump.  As an artist you are interpreting what you see but you have to understand the basic structure of a wave.

Putting waves together and you notice that there are often structures of waves as the wind catches the ripples. The fun for painting water is noticing these patterns of refraction and interference patterns as the wind interacts with the water. Perspective even gets its fingers into the action as well. As the body of water recedes into the distance the waves get smaller, wave patterns converge in the distance and of course the strength of colour in the waves tends to diminish, becoming calmer and even greyer in the distance.

Somebody once said that I was a slave to the photograph, neurotically copying details. My repost is that my paintings look nothing like a photograph. In fact, if I was trying to make them identical to a photo then I am a miserable failure. Indeed I feel my paintings are distinctive in that I have a distinctive style which tells you a lot about what really interests me in what I see: capturing the essence of the reality that I see. When you look closely at my work it looks quite impressionistic as the blobs of colour become apparent. From a distance these blobs merge to create the essence of what I find interesting in what I see the reality of the image.

But how do I put this all into practice? What is my modus operandi?

Stage 1

I block the area of water in, painting a basic average colour for the area and on large areas of water the colour will fade and become greyer as it recedes into the distance. Often I give this colour a second even third coat to get the density of coverage, letting each coat dry before over painting with the next coat. As I use oil paints this might take a day or two. I am not a fan of thin paint and loose painterly textures. My paintings are not about painterly effects. They are about enjoying what I see.

Stage 2

I will paint dark stokes over the blocked in area of colour. Often very small horizontal and occasional strokes in the distance becoming stronger in colour  and larger strokes as I work down the area of water to the foreground, looking carefully to capture the patterns of the waves/ ripples and remembering the effects of perspective

Stage 3

Next I paint the mid tones often blues or colours reflecting colours around the water and the colours of the water as it carries muds and algae in it.

Stage 4

 The final breathing of life into the scene is to put in the highlights, the glints of the sun. it is amazing that as I work my way down the water with these glints that the scene comes to life. Often I have to revisit stages 2, 3, 4 even 1 as I need to revise and correct details as I seek to create the feeling of reality in my painting.

This is a painting of the City from Waterloo Bridge. The ripples on the River Thames form an important element of the painting.