Paddleboarders

very crowded on the day itself so we went there a day before as everyone was getting organised.

An old Thames barge acts as the centre piece and as we sat in the garden the barge came and moored  about 70 metres off shore. Several canoeists and paddle boarders had been practicing for the races and gathered in the sunshine to watch it anchor. I watched them to see what might happen. All that did happen was that a breeze blew across the surface of the water in the lee of the barge and created a stripe of darkness in the sun sparked water.

You can see this running diagonally across my painting from top right down towards bottom left. I used it to contain the two paddle boarders. My painting is very anecdotal, this was one of those moments I like to catch. They were dressed in big lifejackets, as shown, one of them was manoeuvring the board while the other just reclined – it was her pose that had caught my eye. Both had dark hair that we straggling down their backs and drying in the sun uncombed.

The pole and their board, their lifejackets and the wind track all looked very black and white. Nearby was a pink canoe with another pair in it. So, I  “borrowed“ the colour of the canoe for this board and keyed up the patterns of the wavelets, giving them a bit of colour as well. That led me to put some highlights in their hair but I did not go on to work up their faces or add shadows to their arms and legs. What I had seen was a silhouette and shadows and features would have lost  that feeling.