Appledore harbour at low tide

A momentous day in the UK, but life, and thankfully painting will go on.

Visiting a new location is always a pleasure, since exploring and figuring out how to interpret a scene is a big part of the fun. Unfamiliarity with a subject does add to the challenge though, and often it is only after finishing my effort that I think I may have an idea about how to paint it. Then, when staying with a painter friend in the coastal town of Appledore recently there was one additional difficulty – rain.
Appledore harbour at low tide provides some good compositions to choose from, and the one here I just about managed to set up at without sinking into the wet sand/mud. This was the brightest point of my visit – it had stopped raining – but the sun was still caught behind thin cloud most of the time. I perhaps should have used more artistic licence to create stronger counterchange through the scene. For example I painted the buildings in shade, as they were (when the sun came through), but perhaps should have pretended they were sunlit in order to have them white against the darker clouds. It’s all very clever thinking of these things after the event… At the very end the sun properly came out (now a familiar experience this year) and the scene looked a lot better, particularly because of more light reflected from the damp sand… sadly too late for my watercolour!

Towards Northam from a marshy creek.

Just before starting – spitting with rain, but we gave it the benefit of the doubt.