Fun at the Lake (Work in Progress)

The client gave me a lot of great digital photos of this lake house in Michigan but I needed to compose the painting of elements from a variety of different ones. Rather than doing pencil sketches, I thought I'd do a little color sketch in acrylics on an 8 x 10 canvas board. This little painting helped us determine we needed to put the swing on the left side of the tree with a child in it. Also to make the flag on the right side of the house the Canadian flag with the maple leaf on it. Now that I've started working on the larger (18 x 24") watercolor, this little sketch is helping keep me oriented to the overall composition for the painting, especially now that I can put a lot more detail in.

Day one. Decided to rough in some large areas of the composition before starting to lay down misket (frisket) to block out the light areas like the porch railings and window sills. 

That big open space of lake in front of the island in the lower right corner didn't seem like it was going to work, especially at this size. Even in the small sketch, there's a 1" horizontal stripe of lake across the bottom that's difficult to tie with the rest of the painting. Had a great photo of the 2 kayakers so going to try it. Client's not sure but will let me proceed; I don't think we'll know how well it works until I get a lot further along than this.

30 days in and it's progressing but maybe too slowly to look good by Christmas, which is one week from today. I'll take a better photo tomorrow to show the clients. They've already told me they're willing to wait to make sure it looks the way they want it to. That's a good gift to me at this point. You can never tell quite how long a painting will take to finish and this one has a lot of elements in it but the sketch keeps reminding me it's got to look like a cohesive whole and hang together, as well as portray all the details of fond memories of this "happy place."

Back to the drawing board tomorrow after a good night's sleep!