ALL PAINTINGS should adhere to the basic design principles in one form or another. Low Rider has those elements along with a very strong composition. Looking at the elements that make this painting interesting, you have to consider the unusual pose of the stingray and the position of the permit hoping for a free meal. This scenario is very common to anyone who has been a permit fisherman for very long and it’s certainly a situation you hope for. The fishing strategy is to wait for the ray to dip down plowing his nose into the sand to root out any shrimp or crabs and the permit races into the feeding zone for a meal. That’s when you throw the fly!
The color pallet is divided into three different zones: the overhead blue water, the ray and permit and the bottom elements. They all require a different working group of paint layouts. Once I got everything roughed in, I then could work on the details to bring the painting to life. One challenge was to get the colors right on the permit who is cruising underneath the ray and therefore in his shadow. The blue and green reflective colors that would normally show on the skin of the permit are in shadow, the top of the fish has the shadow but the bottom of the fish still has some reflection from the bottom. It took me a while to get that right!