KT Painted It: Sunset Beach

I've never painted anything on a canvas.

I've also never painted a picture for someone else.

Drawing is different - pencils are easier to control. Paint on the other hand. Meh...not so much for this untrained artist-want-to-be.

All self-degradation aside, I wanted to paint a picture for my hubs for his birthday this year.

One of our favorite pictures is of a sunset we watched while at Key West, FL in 2011. Here is the picture:

Amazing, right? This was one of the two pictures that we asked my little sister to paint for us for Christmas, but she chose another one instead. Eric was a little bummed, and I told him that I would paint the picture for him. So here is my attempt!

I decided to use a technique with short brush strokes using acrylic paints and a brush type called a "scrumbler". Here are my paints and brushes (a 4.0 and 6.0 size). The paints are all acrylic.

I chose a 24x30inch canvas for no particular reason, but it turned out to be a good thing that I didn't go any larger because using such small brush strokes was tedious. 

I printed the picture that I was attempting to duplicate, and taped it to the top of the canvas so that I could look at it while I was painting. 

I started from the bottom with the ocean, and worked my way up toward the sky, incorporating all of the colors that I could see, trying to add as much dimension as possible (woah! that sentence has a TON of comas...)

Here is was I came up with. A couple of notes to myself for the future - I really liked the 6.0 brush that I used for the sky. The brush strokes were not as coarse, and the colors blended together a lot nicer than they did for the water using the 4.0 brush. 

Next, I added in the tree line. I decided to make the tree line taller than the original picture, which was reflective of being closer to the tree line. In doing so, I also decided to bring the tree in the foreground of the picture "close" by making it larger in the front of the painting. Here is the tree line below...

And the final and most arduous task: the tree in the foreground. I really wanted to make sure to have enough details to show the leaves and the skyline in the background between them. This was not an easy task! However, I'm pretty excited about the results:

Finally, I went back and improved some of the parts of the painting that I wasn't so happy with initially. I also added some more color to the sky to incorporate the clouds from the original painting.

Here is my finished product:

This was a Katy-Did-It with love, for my amazing husband. Happy (early) birthday, Eric. I love you so much!