The way back

You know I mentioned at the beginning of the year that I was stalled in my 100 painting project and was looking for a way to get back into it again. Because it is a project that I would like to see through to its completion. So anyway, about a week ago I was visiting the blogs of some of my favorite artists and I came across this post and this post on Barbara Newton's blog, Barbara Newton Art Journal. I have long admired her pastel landscapes and was fascinated when she explained her method of doing thumbnails to jump start her painting process.

Now, I have always known that doing thumbnails is a good idea, for working out things like composition and maybe even color relationships. It's just that I hardly ever do them. I do use my camera as an extension of my sketchbook, and tend to make a lot of adjustments in Photoshop to the images that I ultimately use as reference. And as a result I tend to skip the actual drawing of a thumbnail step. Which works okay, except that when working from a photo I can sometimes get all caught up in the details and lose sight of some of the qualities that attracted me to the image in the first place. So when I saw Barbara's post, it was an "Aha" moment for me. This may be just the approach I need to get back into my painting project and move it forward.

I opened one of my picture files, sat in front of my computer screen and scribbled with my Neocolor II water soluble crayons into six boxes I had drawn onto watercolor paper. I did these very quickly, wanting to only get my initial reaction to the images. Then I took the page to my drawing table and brushed on water, adding more color here and there, without looking at the original references. I was just reacting to what was already on the paper. Once it dried, I scanned my thumbnail page (shown above) and created a copy in grayscale (shown below).

Here you can see my first two attempts of painting directly from my thumbnails, as well as the original thumbnail page and the grayscale copy for value reference. I did make my thumbnails a bit larger than Barbara Newton's. After I try a couple more paintings from this set I would like to attempt this process again, making the thumbnails much smaller, in order to distill the imagery even further. It's a way back into painting with a process that may just work for me. I still have three more previously completed paintings to post before I get to this new group, but I'll keep you posted on how this method is working out.