Beach Huts in the Snow Christmas Card Design.

This was a nice little project for the weekend, creating a painting for this years Christmas card. For the last few years I've created a Christmas card from one of my paintings,   It always feels a bit more personal and hopefully a bit more special to be able to give one of my own cards to family, friends and my students at  Christmas time. I'd left it a bit late this year as I like to give cards out to all my students and as one of my classes was due to take a break for Christmas at the start of the following week I only had the weekend to come up with a design and print a few off.     I wanted to create painting that had a flavour of  Southend-on-Sea, the coastal town in which I live so I based my painting on a photo I took a wile ago back in 2013. We don't get much snow at all in our little corner of Essex so I had to rely on photos rather than going out on site for this one. As I wanted a few figures in the image I also had a trawl through my lap top for a few suitable reference images I could add in. I didn't quite get the painting finished in time for my Monday evening class but had enough completed to crop a section out of the middle which when I'd printed it up I was happy with.

The Technical stuff: If you're interested in seeing how the imaged developed stage by stage and what decisions I made on the way please read on...

I was feeling a bit rough at the weekend with a cold so I opted for the comfort of my sofa as a make shift studio for this one:

I started sketching out the design using a light grey pastel pencil.

I then used Acrylic paints to block in the main colours

And make a few marks where I thought the figures should go.

 After lunch I had another look and realised the beach huts were feeling a bit small in the painting so I zoomed in a bit and re painted them a bit larger and moved the figures over a bit.

A bit more work on the figures...

With the under painting completed I swapped to Oils which I feel a bit more comfortable with and changed the colour of the child's coat to vary it a bit.

The card blanks I had in stock were all square so I selected this section of the painting just to be able to print out a few cards for the evenings class I was about to teach but I rather liked them as a square cards so I  decided to stick with the shape.

Here's the finished painting which I completed in the studio.   Leigh Road from outside Miss Annabel Dee Gallery.  10" x 12" Oil on board, sold.