Don't Rock the Boat

What comes first … the title or the painting? For this colourful artist, it can be either – and experimenting can lead to accidentally creating individual techniques.

- Paul Dorin

DEMONSTRATION

STEP ONE

What came first: The title of the painting? For me, it can be either. There is nothing worse than staring at a blank canvas. Normally I will rough out a couple of layouts (on A4 or A3 layout paper) of the subject I am going to paint.

I’d visualized my subject characters and what they might look like.

I sketched the characters roughly … this is where things end up in the file (bin). I like my paintings to be moving and not standing still. This was the first time I had painted a boat in one of my paintings, so I was hoping it was going to work.

STEP TWO

Painting the background – this was where I placed the canvas on the easel and looked at it for a moment, deciding on the colours that I was going to use. Being a fishing painting, I dominated the canvas with blues and whites. This was the fun part of the painting. I used a palette knife, applying four or five colours straight from tubes and tubs; covering and spreading over the canvas. I started from the middle and worked up and down, creating a background and foreground. The first colour I laid down was Yellow Oxide. I then used a four-inch-thick brush and gave my arm a workout, very quickly brushing and blending the colours using criss-cross strokes. Blue at the top for the sky and stronger blue at the bottom for water – showing depth – with the Yellow Oxide giving the impression of land.