Creating a successful coastal landscape involves more than just depicting trees and water—it's about finding that perfect compositional balance that invites viewers into your world. In this post, I'll walk you through my process for a recent 4x6 painting called "Morning by the Sea," exploring how compositional choices create emotional resonance in Tonalist landscapes.

Preparing the Surface

I started with an MDF board that had been prepped with three coats of house paint applied with a foam roller. This gives a fairly smooth result, though it does build up some texture, especially in the corners. I sand this down twhich creates a milky feel on the boards surface. Before painting, I oiled out the board for two important reasons: to see the true color of the surface and to enable me to erase easily during the painting process. This preparation step might seem minor, but it significantly impacts how the paint behaves and how easily you can make adjustments.

Finding Inspiration

This scene began as a very loose riff on a Charles Warren Eaton composition. Eaton would often paint these sort of pine scenes, but I made significant departures from his approach. Where he had placed a tall pine tree right in the middle of the composition, I removed that element entirely and installed a road instead and kept making adjustments until something unique emerged.

This illustrates an important principle in my work: I don't worry about creating completely "original" compositions. Instead, I approach each scene fresh, asking myself how I can convey an emotional quality and move the viewer's eye through the painting.

Compositional Adjustments

During the underpainting session, I made several critical adjustments:

Lowered the horizon line from where I initially placed it
Varied the intervals between the trees to avoid monotonous spacing
Evaluated whether to add elements on the left side to stop the eye
Adjusted the width between vertical elements to create more interesting negative spaces

These might seem like subtle changes, but they're absolutely crucial. While viewers might forgive slightly off values or flat colors, compositional issues can make a painting fundamentally unsuccessful, compositional fails are very hard to overcome.

Develop Your Compositional Sense

One of the reasons I constantly stress painting more often is that experience is really the only way to develop your compositional sense. You need enough paintings under your belt to recognize what works and what doesn't. While the possible arrangements in landscape painting might seem infinite, at a macro level, they're not. The pleasing arrangements of trees, skies, paths, and seas fall into recognizable patterns.

This painting uses a reverse L-shaped composition. For a long time, younger me would have worried about leaving everything open on one side—the water and sky are open, the land's open, nothing stopping the eye. But it actually works beautifully because the edge of the picture offset against the horizon itself stops the eye and pulls you back, while the path powerfully draws you into the scene.

The Path

I have a real addiction to including paths in my paintings, and for good reason—they're incredibly effective. Paths serve multiple purposes:

They resolve what could be a stagnant foreground area
They move the viewer through the foreground and deeper into the scene
They invite the viewer to mentally step into the painting

In this particular painting, the path creates that invitation while also balancing the stronger elements on the right side of the composition.

Challenging Areas

The foreground presented a challenge—the reference showed just a bunch of grass with big lumpy piles. Rather than simply copying this, I employed one of my favorite strategies for "areas of nothing": I started placing big amounts of red in shapes that could be ground, weeds or other elements. This approach creates much more interest than a simple gradation of green from dark to light. While I typically like to include more rock and sand in these coastal scenes, the suggestion of being on a hill overlooking the ocean worked perfectly for the emotional quality I wanted to convey.

The Sea: Embracing the Challenge

Painting the sea always gives me that feeling in my gut—what am I doing? How is this going to work out? Yet when I review the finished painting later, it invariably looks just fine. The addition of white water really made this scene come together, creating that perfect balance between the solid elements of the land and the fluid movement of the water.

This balance between stability and movement, between defined and undefined edges, is what gives Tonalist seascapes their emotional power. It's not about rendering every wave with photographic precision, but about capturing the feeling of being by the sea in the early morning light.

If you're interested in seeing more of my process, check out the members area where I share real-time recordings of painting sessions, or explore the freely available videos in the playlist section of my channel.

Cheers,

Mike

Morning by the Sea 4x6