Low Tide @ Pleasure House Point

Inktense  pencils and watercolors

One place on the path floods often and I can tell which way the tide is going by the way the water is running across the path. A lot of times I go there just to walk and don’t take my art supplies along. Now, we’ve had a few days of rain and I worked on this at home, but the past couple weeks when I went over to walk or to sketch or pick my colors, the flooding place was dry and the water looked like low tide. I could see sand and oysters. When I got home I looked at the tide tables and was surprised to see the tide was almost high because I expected to find it was low tide. I wondered if I could read the tide tables at all.

The last time I went to the point to sketch and pick colors from my charts a lady on the path above where I was standing spoke to me. We were both amazed at how far out the water was and she told me low tide was an hour and a half ago but it hasn’t moved and might not move much even at high tide.

This could be one of the lowest tides I’ll see all year, which was ok because I wanted to paint the oysters on the mud flats.

This week we’re getting a lot of rain so there will be coastal flooding and low tide will look like high tide, I guess.

I don’t have as much confidence working at home as I do working in Plein air or as much confidence working with watercolors as working with oil paint or pastels. The weather forced me to paint at home. I thought it would probably be ok because I did my sketches in plein air and picked my colors and made notes of which color to use in plein air. Then after I get past my reluctance to start, I find that I enjoy drawing with the Inktense  pencils. I can make a texture with the Inktense pencils and I have a lot of colors, so they save me the time of mixing watercolors on my palette.