I started this week by looking through my Animals portfolio. In this I found a demonstration piece that I think was done for a workshop in February 2018. This was nothing to do with animals as I have it down as a ‘back to basics with Trees’ workshop…
It was a quick demonstration of a couple of bare trees on two very small islands. From that start I have added shading to the trees and the islands as well as to the water. This is, therefore, a mix of traditional and contemporary:
I have also added a distant lake edge as well as the fisherman. Again, this was a challenge piece to take a demo and turn it into a composition. I could have stopped here, and although this tells us a certain tale, I wanted to expand a bit more of the story which led to a title change…
If you would like to see the above painting in more detail, please visit my Animals Portfolio.
I started by adding the dog in the bottom right hand corner which gave a diagonal composition.
It then seemed the right thing to add land so that the dog was waiting on the shore for his master. This seemed a bit bare so some darker details were added to key the front of the painting. It still seemed bare so as this is definitely a winter painting some dying water reeds were added in.
There was a lot of white in the whole picture so it became clear that I needed to do something about the sky as I did not want to add any detail to the far shore. I don’t think it is particularly clear in the photo but the sky was swiftly filled with a blue-grey wash.
Last to go in was the Calligraphy. First, the year, 2018 followed by my signature with a space for our studio seal…
You may wish to include the Calligraphy for Dog (gǒu) in your painting. This can be found on our Zodiac Animals Calligraphy page.
I appreciate you may have some totally different compositions from the tree island start which I would love to see. If you have stayed with a landscape it would be great to see what you have done…
Happy painting
Paul
Double Happiness Studio MH 