While I was painting my ink and wash picture of Aberavon Beach, which I wrote about in my last post, I took several photographs of boats on the river, literally just the around the corner behind the point where I made the other picture. When I took a good hard look at the Aberavon Beach picture I could see some ways I thought that I could improve it. I used far less ink shading on it than I would normally do in a straight pen sketch, but even so it still looks rather over-drawn. To be really effective there are parts of it which could do with simplifying. In order to put this idea into practice I selected a photograph with two boats in it. The only detailed lines I made on the original sketch show the boats - everything else is deliberately as limited as possible. The photograph below shows the painting - again, there's room for improvement, but I do think there's progress.