Painting Process: Cheat Lake Backwaters Autumn Sunset

Last fall, I made my way down to the beach at Cheat Lake park quickly before dinner to snap some reference photos for my Cheat Lake Backwaters Autumn Sunset painting to catch the sun dipping below the hilltops.

My family and I spend a good amount of time here since moving nearby and having our son. The trail at the park was an easy place to do stroller walks, to let him practice his first wobbly steps, and now take longer walks and play at the playground with him.

We were helping my son practice his steps, and I looked up and saw an amazing sunset with dramatic clouds that became a beautiful reference photo for the Cheat Lake Winter Sunset painting. 

With so many scenic landmarks nearby, the park might not be the first thing someone thinks about as picturesque, but part of my desire to paint my Cheat Lake paintings was to share that extraordinary beauty in the landscape is everywhere—you don't have to go very far from to find it. Where is a location near your home where you've had a moment of awe? Do these paintings remind you of a favorite lake near you? 

Practice Makes Progress

Pencil + Paper

Back in the studio, I started began my painting process with the usual thumbnail sketches in graphite to select the most compelling composition. 

Color Palette

I wanted to capture the rich, earthy autumn colors accurately so I did some exploratory sketches with a couple of different color triads...

• Nickel Azo Yellow + Indian Red + Prussian Blue (Nickel Azo Yellow was too neon and clashed with the unsaturated Indian Red)
• Permanent Rose + Cobalt Blue + Raw Sienna (Too pink, not enough yellow for variation)
• Indian Yellow + Cobalt Blue + Permanent Rose (Too pink)
• Indian Yellow + Alizarin Crimson + Prussian Blue (Honorable mention for this triad - but the red was still too saturated to use on its own in some areas)

I finally settled on a triad of English Yellow (warm), Indian Red (warm, unsaturated), and Prussian Blue (cool) with a couple of bonus colors on the palette: Raw Sienna Light, Indigo, and Sepia. I found that the unsaturated nature of the Indian Red created the realistic, earthy undertones I have been seeking in a fall painting.

This palette is similar to an old Hushwing Watercolors palette I used for Dolly Sods Bog in Autumn and basically I've been trying to recreate that with other pigments I have on hand. 

A new-to-me subject... waves!

Part of what attracted me to this scene was the challenge of painting the focal point: water and waves. 

I practiced wave thumbnails on scrap sheets of watercolor paper for about two weeks. Some attempts were definitely better than others! 

I had to ask myself how the distant water differed from the soft waves in front, how the shoreline reflected on the water, what color should be on the interior reflection of the wave curl at the shoreline, and how to show the water pulling away from the shore.

A HUGE help in my wave studies involved following and learning from Julia Barminova. She does tutorials on Instagram that are super helpful and shares the colors she uses on her ocean watercolors. I'm amazed by her talent and would love to take one of her actual lessons one day. 

Trial & Error

After wrapping up my small studies, I stretched my paper and got to work sketching the whole scene and diving right into the sky.

The sun rays were tough and I actually reworked them to the point where I ruined my first attempt at the painting. I took a moment of silence for the lost work (lol) and transferred my sketch that I liked with graphite to a new stretched sheet of paper. 

The silver lining of having the ruined first painting meant that if I wanted to practice anything I had a large-scale sketch that I could test things out on. Though I didn't actually end up doing that, it was a nice fail-safe to have. 

With the second attempt, I moved fairly quickly from the sky, to the hilltops, trees and beach, and down to the waves. This version of the painting took about three weeks total, which is my quickest work yet. Painting every morning consistently and all of the thumbnail explorations beforehand definitely helped speed things up.  

Prints Coming Soon

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