I love beach scenes. I find a certain serenity in big skies, crashing waves and rocky outcroppings.

Even so, this one nearly killed me. I used Arches rough to get the rock textures I wanted but I really struggled with the light in this composition.

I take a lot of my photos on my iPhone as I’m randomly exploring places we go. On the surface they look okay, but when I get home and try to select a photo to paint from, I find many of the shadow areas are too dark to really see the textures I’m hoping to represent.

I wanted to enhance the ruggedness of the rocks in this photo in the final painting so I decided to go lighter in the deepest shadow areas, but I’m not really happy with the result.

I added another wash to darken the values a little but it’s still off. You win some…

Some paintings come easily and some are a struggle from the outset.

I’ll chalk this one up to “I made a thing,” and maybe redo it sometime in the future.

Hope everyone is having a good week.

What part of your process do you struggle with?