Chilly seas

We move on.   I don’t think that the sky is finished but one needs to see the whole picture to assess and adjust colours and tones.

The sea is very dark at the horizon, and all frothing waves near the beach.  This hugely enhances the white cloud, and the white, breaking wave  centre stage.  A single pass of very dark green across the whole paper, covered by a pass of turquoise creates the distant sea – how easy!  I love pastels.

The wave deserves some attention.  Of course white foam is going to be unmissable, but I am asking you to look at the whole wave in the photo I am using as my source,  and analyse its different parts.

That wave runs across the picture, a single wave but at different stages of breaking.  on the left there is a welter of water being drawn into the body of the wave, then some tentative breaking followed by the real thing.  Then we have the unbroken water rearing itself up, and  smaller, more grey than white foam.  Even at this size you can see how the rearing part is darker at the top, and that darkness follows the foam down at an angle and runs along the front of the advancing white water.  What else can you see?

This wave, and the white cloud are the stars of the show,  much more important than the rocks in the foreground, though we can have fun with them next week.

2 thoughts on “Chilly seas”

  1. The foam from the previous wave is still rolling up the rocky beach fragmented by the uneven ground and replicating the breaks in the behaviour of the main wave. The wind is whipping the top of the foam on the main wave, especially where it is broken by the two pointed rocks. The area of the as yet uncrested part of the wave is uneven in its attempts to gather water – the darkness of where it is beginning to curve is not consistent along the upper line of the wave. Behind the crest of the main wave there is the next wave beginning to form, again unevenly perhaps due to underlying rocks. It will be intriguing to have a go at this with the oil pastels but I don’t expect the ethereal magic of yours!

  2. I find this sort of picture hard to analyse – I always end up _not_ back where I need to be. Working on it, though!

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