Boats Plein Air- buy now

A nice sunny day at Shelter Island in Point Loma.

A while back someone asked me to post in-progress shots. I mostly do that on my Facebook page (KevinInmanArt on Facebook) because it goes straight from my phone, but here goes. This painting is from Shelter Island in San Diego.

Nothing special about my approach here. It’s a typical alla prima painting starting from the white. I don’t always work this way. I like to experiment.

One rule I was taught in art school was, “never draw with a pencil” – as you can see I’ve disregarded that rule here. Actually the best piece of art advice I ever got was, “only follow advice if you are sure you understand it – and if you want to.”

So why do people say “don’t use a pencil”? Two reasons that I can see- one, beginning students have a tendency to get too tight with the drawing and two, because if the pencil drawing is wrong, your whole painting will be off. But I say, do what works for you.

So here I’ve completed the plein air, alla prima portion of the painting. The next step was to leave it in a stack of paintings for several weeks/months and then I pulled it out, touched it up, signed it, and here it is.