Elora Painting: Part 1 - The Background

I got started on my Elora painting today. I’ve been procrastinating on it after doing the initial drawing as it’s a tricky and unforgiving subject. If I don’t capture Elora’s spirit and character just right, the painting won’t work.

Elora on the Beach, Reference and Initial Drawing, 2025

I want to invite you behind the scenes as I create it. I expect this one will take several sessions and I’ll share my progress along the way rather than saving it all up for the end. This way you’ll get a more honest view of the creation process, mishaps and all.

I’m approaching the painting in two parts: first, the surrounding beach and sky (which I’ll broadly refer to as the background) and second, Elora. I want the background to be simple, almost abstract. And I want Elora to appear more realistic and finely rendered. Something like Waiting by Gordon Coutts (which I saw in person at the New South Wales Art Gallery in 2019).

Today I worked on the background.

I started with a brush and fairly careful, solid strokes for the sky. But it quickly transcended into a flurry of energetic strokes on the surface, driven mostly by intuition and perhaps a touch of impatience. It appeared rough and chaotic, but I trusted my gut. Sometimes you just need to see where it takes you! And there’s no better time than at the start of the painting, and especially when you’re working on the background areas. If I were to mess up here, I could easily save it.

I constantly changed colors and left them partially unmixed on my brush, whilst trying to stay true to the subject and within a compressed value range. The main colors I used were yellow ochre, magenta, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, cobalt tourquise light, cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, raw umber, and titanium white. The aim was to create the illusion of nature’s detail and variance.

Elora on the Beach, Reference and Initial Drawing, 2025, Background 1, 700W

Then I swapped over to a palette knife to smooth out the paint and fill in the gaps. There’s something wonderful about combining brushwork and palette knife strokes like this. The end result was somewhat abstract, but with a quality of realism to it. Just what I wanted! The palette knife was also handy for pushing paint into the rigid edges around Elora.