Don't Rock The Boat
Australian How To Paint|Issue 27

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

Paul Dorin
Don't Rock The Boat

STEP ONE

What came first: The title or 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 visualised 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.

Then it was time for a cup of tea while I let it dry.

This story is from the Issue 27 edition of Australian How To Paint.

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This story is from the Issue 27 edition of Australian How To Paint.

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