Painting a Head-on Ocean Wave | Seascape Oil Painting Tips

Hello everyone and let me welcome you to the studio. This is Windows to Heaven Art. I'm Stephen Cooley, your host for today, and in this episode we're going to be looking at painting a close-up of an ocean wave kind of curling in towards the viewer. Should be a lot of fun and I think we're going to learn a lot, so let's jump into it. Okay, so as you can see I'm well into the modeling stage of this painting and I just wanted to make a quick note here that I wasn't super pleased with the way the block-in turned out. As you can see I've worked past the block-in now and I'm happy with how the modeling stage is going, but I just wanted to give a little tip on doing a block-in. When you're doing a block-in, make sure that your brush strokes are very loose and you want to keep it basic. Keep it simple and the block-in should go relatively quick, so you don't want to spend too much time in the block-in. It's really a fun stage where you can get in there and establish a very generalized version of what the painting is going to look like. So you're going to have mainly your focus be on the shapes and the colors and you want it to stay sort of duller because that will allow you to then build on top of it and get your darker darks in there and your lighter lights later on, like in the detail stage. So this painting right over here is a good example of a block-in that really worked out and I'll show you a picture of it here. You can see that the brush strokes are very loose. I feel like for this guy right here I kept the strokes far too tight and just for lack of a better word it was too perfect and it just didn't look right. Thankfully I was able to move past it and you can see that I got the modeling going right now. This is actually all totally dried, so I'm going to start a new session of painting now. Yeah, I just wanted to make that note. All right, let's get back to it. Well, I think that about sums it up for today. Thank you guys so much for coming out to the studio. It was a real pleasure having you here with me. I hope you guys were able to learn something maybe to employ in your own art. If you like the video, leave me a like, consider subscribing, and leave a comment as well. I really appreciate you guys' input. Until next time though, God bless you guys. We'll see you in the next one.