Fishing Boats – From Inspiration to Art

Although I didn’t have time to sketch them, I couldn’t resist taking some quick snaps of these fabulous fishing boats, recently dry-docked in Koroni harbour.

Back at the studio, inspired by the memory of the boats and armed with my photos, I began to compile a visual ‘mood-board’ – quickly pulling together a pile of boaty images, including some previous sketches done at the harbour.

As I was in the mood for a challenge, I bravely picked out a canvas much larger than my usual working size! With my photos and sketches for reference, I drew the boat directly onto acid-free tissue paper with a newly purchased acrylic paint marker pen.

Before doing the drawing I covered the canvas with scraps of Greek text – perhaps my favourite stage of a collage – interweaving different papers, sizes and fonts. It’s an important stage to get right but its also quite freeing, as changes can be made relatively easily.

After carefully sticking the tissue paper drawing onto the prepared canvas, I started painting the first layers with dilute acrylics.

The layers of colour were gradually built up – it was fun working with acrylics in a watercolour-like way.

Working wet-in-wet in some places allowed the colours to run into each other, as in the sea here.

Here’s the (almost finished) painting above, although I later did some remedial work on that floating leg – adding a wood chock and a bit more shadow under the boat.

Here’s a scale shot of the finished painting, entitled Shored Up, posing outside the studio. I finished the work with a good coating of matte medium and some transparent UV varnish.