Vancouver Beach Walk
At only 3 x 4 inches this was fairly quick to do. (It didn’t really take a month, I’ve been on vacation : )
I squeezed out a line of gutta along the water edge. When the gutta was dry I painted the sand below in quick strokes with a brush. The gutta stops the sand colour bleeding into the part I want to be blue.
When using gutta there is always a slightly heavier deposit of colour right next to it. The paint stops dead at the gutta and has nowhere else to go except back over on itself. Luckily that’s exactly what I wanted in this picture, as there is naturally a slim shadow cast by the foam itself and the sand really does look darker there.
After painting the water I machine-sewed all crazy with white thread in the foreground to look like foam. This is so forgiving, mistakes only make it better. I also hand stitched some white wool in there at the thickest part for extra volume.
For the gull I used some white wool chopped up and glued down with tacky glue. There are some stitches in there for his legs and wings, and I had to use tiny dots of pastel dye sticks (applied using the tip of a pin) to get the detail of the beak and eye. For a long time little Kenny hovered between life and the dreaded fate of being unpicked and sewn over into foam, but he made it. His shadow was the last thing I painted, and he was all “yay.”