A day at the beach

This morning my family packed up the car and headed to Galveston beach, only an hour from Houston. I brought along my paint and some small canvases, thinking I might want to paint. It’s always a debate (with myself) whether or not I want to bring my painting supplies, if I do bring them then I feel like I should be painting. Sometimes I just want to go to the hill country or to the beach and not feel like I need to do anything at all. Anyway, today I brought them, just in case, which is what usually happens.

And oh, what fun I had painting. I think today I probably had one of the best times I have ever had painting. The four of us rented chairs and a big umbrella so I had a shady place to paint. There was a nice breeze so (in the shade) it was quite comfortable.

The day started out calm and sunny, so I painted the beach, ocean and sky on a small 4″x4″. And I liked it! I am not usually succesful en plein aire so I wasn’t expecting much. It was a nice surprise to paint something I liked.


An hour after that the wind picked up and some dark clouds were blowing in. I found that interesting and beautiful, so I squeezed out more paint. When I noticed the sun shining on part of the water and illuminating it to make a greenish color, compared to the dark shadows on the water, I grabbed my canvas and was frantic to paint the water and the sky. The clouds were moving fast so I had to be quick. That was the fun part! No thinking, just mixing paint and putting it on the canvas. This time I used a 5″x7″ canvas, a little bigger than the first.


With the storm moving in I had already cleaned off my pallette and put away my brushes but then . . . even darker clouds and well, it wasn’t raining yet. My kids were counting the seconds between the lighting and thunder to see how far away the storm was, they were looking pretty worried, thinking we were going to get soaked very soon. Not me, I squeezed out paint again, grabbed another canvas, an 7″x9″ this time, and started painting. I think this last painting is my favorite, and all three paintings will be a lovely memory of our family’s day at the beach.

Half an hour later the storm was gone and the sky was blue again. It was 3:00 pm and time for us to pack up and head back home.

I have always heard how there is nothing like painting en plein aire, how photographs lose so much of the actual color. Well, today I saw that, probably for the first time. I saw orange in the stormy skies, I never would have seen that in a photograph. And I’m sure I missed many of the colors in the water, but I know I saw more than a photograph would have shown me. So now I finally get it and I’m hooked.

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