The lake at the sunset – Alina Madan Paintings

This is my first painting done all by myself without following any lesson. I simply searched a photo online and found that i loved.

I had a 10*10 stretched canvas from a craft store-that worked as i was hesitant to start with a large canvas:)

SO here is the original photo i used:

I loved the combination of the warm colors.

I started by getting rid of the white canvas color (that’s what everyone teaches to do). SO i did water-mixable colors to create a light purple – the dominant color of the painting.

When i had the purple underwash i got nervous- what to do next? There was no teacher to follow 🙂
I decided to continue with a monotone painting. I used just a dark purple color to define the main setting of the painting’s objects as well as scribbling with a palette knife:

After defining all the objects i continued with the sky and the horizon line working mostly on dark and light spots :

Then i defined the area of the grass, turned out to be too light, so later i made it much darker. Also, i struggled with the water reflections and tiny waves:

Managed to create the water reflections looking realistic and worked on the grass:

Added touch-ups to the grass and the water surface with the light horizontal lines (paint and palette knife scribbles):

Here is how my palette looked like:

In the end i had to finish painting the bottom part of the canvas. Here you can see how messy i am when painting. I hate wearing gloves so in the end of a painting session i spend some time on cleaning my hands 😉

I painted the rest of the sides on the go while working on the whole painting, but obviously could not do that with the bottom as it was unreachable.

Here is the comparison of what i got and the original painting:

OK, till this moment i pretty much was satisfied with what i had done. Now, looking at the two pictures above i must admit: i miserably failed:):):):):) the main thing I missed was the overall tone of the pic 🙂

Oh well, i guess first time is always tough:) At least i had fun!

You can view the detailed final pic here:

The painting is at my etsy store: