Koho, Santa Barbara Harbor

My Reference Photo taken abour a week ago.

I was trying to fight off the "boat bug" but that's not going well. Funny story, I always worked in pen & ink in my very early days doing horses, the occasional portrait and a lot of boats. During break at work I would sketch boats really quick and then add color using highlighter markers just for fun. Somewhere during all of that I thought it would be even more fun to learn to paint boat scenes using oil paint so I began to take painting classes in college. We never once painted water or boats.....to learn that I ended up going with Walter Foster books. I have wondered many times if Mr. Foster ever had any idea of just how many millions of budding artists he helped with his series of art books. There just has to be a killer story behind those books and Walter Foster....I'll be off to Google soon.
Anyway, I decided to paint one of the fishing boats in Santa Barbara harbor. I wanted a cool looking boat with some of the dock in it. I didn't want an image showing too many boats because that would need a ton of editing by me and I'm so detail-retentive that I like to leave too much in. I've seen this boat a zillion times down there and I really like her looks. Learning to handle the water was fun and I think I'm getting better at it. So much of it is really just an illusion. I thought about leaving out the floating kelp but I need to learn painting that too so in it went. Not the best looking kelp but I could have done it much worse too, hahaha.
Up top is my reference photo. Here is my final painting. I sketched this directly on the 12"X16" canvas covered panel which I hate doing when it has to be detailed. Not much room for mistakes which causes a lot of erasing. One of these days I will try painting one of these boat scenes with no initial sketch...forcing myself to paint loose as a goose.

"Koho At High Tide"

12" X 16" Oil on panel

Details of the painting.....