I tossed one of my old, incomplete sketchbooks into my bag before leaving to catch the train into New York City this morning. My focus would be on simplifying the streets of the city into a minimum of shapes and only three values. My inspiration came from Powerful Watercolor Landscapes: 37 tools for painting with impact by Catherine Gill, an excellent art book filled with great suggestions to put your tools and skills to good use as well as challenges to strengthen your skills. The day, due to rain, didn’t turn out as I had planned. Most of my drawings were done while waiting for trains. Even so, I consider it to have been an excellent day of learning.
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Having missed a train out of Gladstone by only five minutes, I had an hour to draw the view from the platform bench.
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Gladstone Train Station
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I determined the percentages of dark, middle, and light value shapes and created several variations of the drawing by altering the shapes and the percentage of values, keeping in mind the Papa, Mama, Baby principle of having one value dominant (Papa), one value in a lesser percentage (Mama) and one value as only accent shapes (Baby).
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A narrow variation
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Later, I hung out at Penn Station, out of the rain, drawing people, keeping in mind value dominance and shape/size variations.
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Penn Station, NYC
A Serious Discussion
Checking Departure Gates
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Creating variations of thumbnail sketches is something I don’t often do as part of my painting process. I’m too impatient. Today’s exercise convinced me that my plein air paintings will improve in leaps and bounds if I do this before dipping brush into paint. I generally do one or two, but stop when I come up with an acceptable composition of value/shapes. Now I will not stop at the acceptable …. I will experiment with several more sketches, altering the reality just to see what impact it might have and if it can become stronger by moving another building, eliminating two more trees and changing the black car into a white car.
Thanks for this reminder on varying thumbnails before picking up brush and color. Did this once a few years ago and, yes, my work improved. Stopped doing it for whatever reason, and this was a good reminder to do it again. As always, your blogs etc inspire me.
I have to admit that I don’t ALWAYS do thumbnails, but I’m always happy when I do!
I just found your website and blog and am impressed. I spent 45 minutes just browsing and could spend a few more hours here. I wanted to order the fountain pen that you mentioned that only costs $7.99 but can’t find the post! Can you tell me the brand and where you purchased it? I would like to recommend it to my students.
Here is a link to the newsletter post that mentioned the pen. Please caution your students to not be heavy-handed with it. The nib is wonderfully flexible which alsoeams that it can be damaged if too much pressure is applied. If the ink is not flowing, the top should be dipped into water and wiped clean rather than have more pressure applied to it. The link should bring you to my March Newsletyer… I’m traveling right now without my computer, so simply pecking away on my phone. http://us6.campaign-archive1.com/?u=4ba6a7e919ed7caa6b3693082&id=8f1c7c9816
Thank you for sharing! The true test of a teacher is how eager they are to share their knowledge. My students will love this pen as it is inexpensive enough to just try…
Really useful post Chris. Thank you.