Here is the process I went through to create my East Bay Pointillism Painting. Overall I am quite satisfied with it. This technique is very time consuming, but it is well worth the effort. The painting is 16″x20″ on a gallery wrapped canvas.

This painting was done in early 2018.

Here is the original photo I took along the St Lawrence River in Eastern Ontario in July 2016. Although the photo is very similar to the painting, I did make some changes, such as moving the tree to the left hand side to draw the eye into the painting and then down to the flowers

Here is the original drawing I started with. I drew this on sketching paper, then transferred it to the canvas using graphite on the back of the paper.  I used a grid that I created in gimp then reproduced it on my drawing to make sure that everything was proportionate. The photo was very good, and I did not want to deviate too far from it, with the exception of moving the tree.

Although trees and plants are organic and can vary greatly in shape, they all have a set of proportions that they grow by. For this reason it is very important to pay close attention to their specific characteristics and not just think of them as easy to draw, or else they will look rigid and unnatural.

In this version I began the pointillism process. It seems to go very fast in the begging, but there are not nearly enough colours and shades to call it finished. I started by adding small dots of blue, cyan, greens and purples.  and yellows and oranges in the clouds.  This photo was taken around 4.5 hours into the painting, and I consider this a very early stage.

In this version I continued working. I added more colours to the white flowers to give them more definition and basically darkened everything by adding more dots. I also added a few reds  to compliment the greens in the foreground. This version was about 9 hours into the painting.

In this version I added a lot of whites, and off whites, the painting seems to get lighter again, but the dots are mixing more together, and it appears as the dots are all together, as opposed to dots on a white background. I also worked more on the distant trees adding yellows, purples and reds to the green. This was taken around 15 hours into the painting.

Here is the final version of the painting. I added more darker colours once more, and worked a lot on the water adding various hues of blue, cyan, green and ultramarine.  I also added yellows and greys to the highlight areas and spent some more time on the flowers. In total the painting took around 22 hours.