Camping at the River

Painting # 89. This is one I'd been planning for a while. It's a painting of a place I go camping every summer, where we plant our chairs in the river and hang out in the sun all day. I had already prepped the canvas with black gesso weeks ago, creating rocks all along the river in order to give the illusion that rocks can be seen through the water as the water is shallow enough. This was the first time I tried painting a river. The first thing I did was cover the entire canvas with liquid clear, even the sky area, so the blue would not be diluted. I wanted to create the feel of a clear summer day with a bright blue sky. The river was covered with a mixture of green, brown, and a bit of blue to reflect the color of the water where I live in Quebec, Canada. I tried using the knife to 'scrape' some titanium white along to create the illusion of reflections and water moving. Overall, this was really fun and took around 2 hours. 16x20

---