Chloe Gilbert

This painting, done in gouache, will probably be my last in this series of ‘Hope Cove’ images.

Hope Cove is the place where all of our summer holidays were when I was a child, so it has a special place in my heart. We also have a family reunion on the first weekend in July in Hope Cove. My grandparents moved there with their kids (my dad!) during WWII. My uncle met his wife there. My mum was from Kingsbridge which is a town nearby, and I have lots of family and memories of there as well. There is also a lot of sadness associated with Hope Cove, more on that later…

In the first painting in the series, Hope Cove Boats, I was trying to capture the brightly painted boats, and the reflections in the water. Things are very bright and colourful. But something else has always intrigued me about these boats, and that are the long ropes that anchor the boats to the beach to stop them drifting away. I wanted to capture those ropes in the painting. They anchor more than the boats, they link the water in the mid part of the painting to the foreground, helping to tie the image together.

The ropes are also a metaphor, and form part of the visual language of the painting. Here it is not very deep meaning, just that we as a family used to be very close, and we are like the boats, and the ropes bind us together, and to this place.

In the second painting in this series, the ropes are pulled taut, as if some of the boats are straining to be let free. Or to break away from the family.

In this second painting, which was done using mainly gouache and very little watercolour, things begin take on more detail. Things become clearer. The colours of the boats are still bright though.

For the third painting I’m doing now, wanted it to look a little bit more serene, maybe a bit sadder.

Using a mix of really washed out ultramarine blue and transparent white I painted the sky using a wet-on-wet technique, using a clean mop brush loaded with water and a clean sponge to pick up the colour and get the wispy clouds. The cloud is where the white of the paper is showing through. I will not touch the sky again after this point, so I will need to keep that area clean of drips and fingerprints etc!

For this painting I did do a thin wash of colour over pretty much everything that was left, but I wasn’t too concerned about the actual colours, they are just an undercoat and using opaque gouache over the top very little will show through, if any at all.

It might be worth me showing you the actual palette for this painting, because it is the same palette used for the previous two. I haven’t added any more paint to the palette since the first painting in this series! In fact I also use this same palette for the narrowboat painting that I did before.

This is a mixture of watercolour and gouache on the same palette. The blue bottom right is a mixture of ultramarine, cerulean blue, and opaque white. The green is made from lemon yellow, a tiny amount of neutral tint plus a spot of W&N sap green. I prefer to mix my own greens where possible.

I decided to make the trees look more lifelike in this one, so I’m working on them with a narrow no.2 brush. trying to get the bushes and trees look a bit more 3d, so I added a lot more neutral tint to the bottom parts of the bushes, making them almost black.

Pulling back you can see that the overall effect is more detailed and lifelike, but using a smaller brush makes for very slow work.

I will post more on this painting as I make more progress. I’m going to be spending some time on this over Christmas and into the new year. In the meantime I hope you have a merry Christmas 2019 and happy new year for 2020!