Stormy seascape roughs

I was delighted to receive another commission recently, this time for a 30 x 20" seascape painting in oils. It'll be my largest painting to date and I'm very much looking forward to getting started once I finish my current commission for the flamenco dancer. In the meantime I thought I'd post up the digital roughs I have been working on this week in preparation.

The brief was nice and straightforward - a stormy sea with rocks and a lighthouse. It took me a quite a few attempts to eventually arrive at a composition that I liked and had all the necessary ingredients. I wanted to make the wild, stormy waves the centre of interest, framed by the rocks, and so decided to push the lighthouse into the background. I've perhaps pushed it too far back so I might adjust later to bring it forward and make it more noticeable. Of the three images above my main working one is in the middle, with a darkened version below to give an idea of how the painting might look if it was a night storm. I found it easier to work in black and white to begin with and then add the colour later. The colour version at the top gives me an idea of the sort of palette I might use, although the colours are fairly loose at this stage.

The roughs are more detailed than I'd normally make them - enough to make them nice little digital paintings in their own right I think - but I'm feeling a lot more comfortable about doing the final painting with all that detail already worked out. It's a big canvas after all (big for me that is!) so I don't want to leave too much to chance as it were. As one of my favourite landscape artists Scott Christensen said, ugly is one thing but big and ugly is another thing altogether!