I am loving painting another photo of a shell on the beach and inspired about the next beach scene. In a moment of contemplation, I thought, wait? What? Is this all I am going to do? Sand and shells?

That’s not OK.

But why not? Why am I painting? What is wrong with doing what I love? Who am I painting for?

Then I thought of Georgia O’Keefe. Did anyone tell her to move on from painting close ups of flowers? I can think of a dozen artists who did what they did and, well, that’s all.

I sell a few paintings or prints here and there but this is not my main source of income. This is what I do for me. This is what makes me happy. Yes, I love painting trees, portraits and sometimes other things will occur to me. Monet said something about light being the most important person in a painting but I tend to think it is color. I just want to paint fantasies and color.

Now since the last blog post, I have tried a few other subjects to paint but I am not happy with them so I went back to “shells and sea foam”. My happy place.

I was inspired by a few photos I saw of “clumpy” sea foam. Not the lovely little wisps of bubbles that I usually paint but clumps. Of course. I wanted to see if I could do that.

I chose a little mussel shell that I found at the beach here as my subject.

And started doodling with Fineline Masking Fluid to create the foam. I am winging it here as I want the thick lines of foam with open cells in some sort of pleasing design to come out of all of this.

I also want the feel of a wave going out leaving the shell behind for me to find. I think I have it here – not too much, not too little. Hard to visualize how it will come out, though!

I ended up going over the main “lines” of foam with more mask to make them pretty much opaque instead of open and airy.

To paint in the background, I got the paper very wet, then went over it again to make sure it was soaked.

Working as quickly as I could, I did a wash of Burgundy Yellow Ochre, Goethite, Davy’s Gray, Terre Verte and Hematite Burnt Scarlet at the very edge of the wave for a shadow. When mixed with Goethite, the scarlet makes an odd wine-dark neutral that I love to use. For the waves, simply Cerulean, Terre Verte and Amethyst were used.

Quick, while there was still pigment suspended on the wet paper, I threw down some Morton’s salt.

It takes experimentation to find pigments that granulate well. I usually throw in a little Davy’s just because it is pretty much a non-color but it granulates with salt so well. There’s no other way I know of to get this sort of texture.

Here’s what that granulation looks like up close.

As it was still drying, I added more pigment under the wave edge and down the middle to make it look more like wet sand. That killed some of the salt effect but it still gives texture.

Now here it is with all the masking removed.

What I usually do after removing masking fluid, is run a wet brush over the whole area to just smear and soften the harsh lines a little. It doesn’t make a huge difference but it does make it a little less “artificial” looking.

Now to start adding dimension to the sea foam. I have NO idea how to do this. Using Cerulean and Amethyst, I just started trying to add dimension.

Yes, I hate this but it is not done. A large part of painting is seeing. I keep looking at the reference photos to see how it looks in “real life” vs. what I am painting. The more you look, the more you see.

I need to step back so I start painting the shell. Again, I masked a few areas then just started floating in color. The only new pigment here is Manganese Blue. It is an electric turquoise blue best used in small quantities! Oh, and I see that I added a little Potter’s Pink in the very bowl of the shell.

I am not blown away by how wonderful this is but it’s OK and it is just plain fun and a learning experience.

After stepping back again, I wanted to add more shadow under the foam edge and down the center. The darkest pigment in the shadow is Neutral Tint.

Now I confess, I usually work on more than one painting at a time. I have 4 of these Dick Blick “Drafting Boards” that I can mount the paper onto. This way, while one is drying, I can play around with another one. I am painting similar foam on another one, and just to experiment, I took a spray bottle of water and sprayed the foam to make it even softer. It worked wonderfully.

So I tried it on this one – forgetting that I had already signed the bottom of this one. And it turns out the new pen that I used is not waterproof so the signature bled. Oh well, another learning experiment. It just means I can’t really sell this one but then again, it is not my best. Just another step in the learning process.