I had intended to make this a wash and pen painting but did not anticipate the particularly damp weather conditions last week when I was tutoring The Art in the Park lesson. I used a canvas and drew in the major shapes.  

I then used a blue acrylic (usually very quick drying) to underpaint the sky. However, it would just not dry enough to keep adding further applications of paint without the colours mixing to secondary or indeed tertiary colours. 

So, I waited and I waited. I should have waited longer as in my speed I started to apply paint and hey presto! I ended up with some wonderful green colours just where I did not want them. Lesson learnt: you cannot look at paint and hope that makes it dry!  

So on returning home I decided that pen was not going to be sufficient to correct the incorrect colours. I used a wide variety of blues that I mixed from pthalo, ultramarine, cobalt, zinc white and experienced a huge amount artistic joy when I started applying my blues to the canvas and they were keeping their integrity, and not resulting in some wonderful concoction of earth colours.

I used the above colours both in the sky and for the sea. For the brighter part of the sky I used lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, I mixed an orange using lemon yellow and cadmium red, and I used zinc white for the shape of the sun. All paints I used were acrylics. 

When using a large canvas like this make sure you have plenty of large brushes. A great challenge I see with learners is that they often very carefully apply paint with small brushes. This makes hard work of what should be great fun. Once you get used to using them you will find how much easier it is to apply paint.  

I used the points of brushes for sky, and then side of brush to blend paint. I used two different fan brushes for the trees. I mixed a wide variety of greens for the land, making some really dark greens by adding increased portions of burnt umber. 

For the sand I mixed a yellow ochre, 70% with 30% burnt sienna. I then made a further mix of the same and added some Indian red to that.  

When the whole painting was 100% dry (two days later, just in case), I used pure zinc white for a few suggestions of surf on the sea and for the edge of the water spilling on to the beach.