This little landscape was inspired by a detail of my coloured-in Port Chalmers colouring page ~ now completely reimagined. 

I really didn’t like my first attempt (see previous post). It wasn’t fun to paint and I didn’t feel connected to the end result. So I stopped painting from the reference and started looking at what was in front of me on the canvas… exploring shapes and colours and remembering how it felt when we first came upon this view back in 2017. And I had a ball.

I was at the point of deciding whether or not to paint the house in the foreground a brighter red when my husband walked in and said “it’s finished” 🎨 …and so it is.

The inspiration for this painting came from a detail of my coloured-in Port Chalmers colouring page but I have been struggling with how I want to paint it. If nothing else, it has been useful as a background for a great quote by Rob Bell (my painting study WIPs are included below).

It looks better on screen than it does in real life and even though it is what I set out to paint, I really do not like it. What worked as digital art simply has nothing to offer as a painting. It feels very ‘meh’ to me. Which is great. Because now I know what not to do. Meanwhile I have already painted a second version of this little landscape and it is COMPLETELY different, but I’ll write more about that in the next post : )