A mermaid combs her hair as she lies on a rock on a deserted shore line in the soft early morning light. She has suddenly turned around as she notices a distant ship on the horizon, the next victims for the red-haired femme fatale?
This painting is really all about the sky. I always saw her in my mind's eye as semi-silhouetted against the sky looking towards the distant ship. The model as usual is the lovely Naomi Wood.
I wanted to avoid a corny sunrise/set painting so I set the time as dawn is breaking, the first rays of the morning sun yet to shine on the mermaid and the foreground landscape.
It was painted on a stretched Winsor & Newton "Maritime" canvas but I added two more layers of oil primer sanding between coats to fill in the weave a bit to get it nearer to my preferred surface, linen.
I used mainly transparent colours for the sky so as to help it recede into the background, painting it in layers so as to build them up until I had the right balance of transparency and opacity.
Oil on canvas 39 1/2" x 15 1/2".
There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog
No comments:
Post a Comment