Midnight Bay

This is the first of a series of three nocturne paintings that I am now doing which are a nice counterpoint to the more complex pictures that I have recently been painting. I wanted to keep it within a narrow range of colours between blue and green greys which are based around a green/blue - red/orange colour complementary axis, the orange in this case being mixed into the blue/greens to tone down the saturation. Originally in my mind's eye the foreground figure and rocks were going to be silhouetted but I later realised that it was too big an area to get away with it so I made it semi-silhouette. The model for the figure was as usual, the lovely Naomi Wood. I really enjoyed painting the sky so the next picture will be much more of a sky piece. This will be a painting for possible inclusion in what I take to Illuxcon in October. 
Oil on linen 18" x 24". There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.