The Outside Shore
Demonstration - Around The Bend
The Block-In
 I chose a tan piece
of Canson Mi-Teintes paper that I had previously cut to 18x24" in anticipation
of framing without a mat. This is a widely available standard size frame,
although it is considerably larger than most people choose for plein air work. I
like how working this size encourages me to be loose.
As is my custom, I used a big-to-small
approach, beginning the painting with only four colors of different values to
indicate the big shapes that define the composition. For this initial block-in,
I chose some fairly intense colors. The blue I used for my dark is not actually
all that dark, but it is quite intense. I planned to layer it with other colors
later, but I wanted the overall feeling of the shadows to be cool. I used an
almost equally intense red for my medium-dark value, as I wanted some warmth to
show through when I layered other colors over it later. Also for warmth, I chose
a light orange for my medium-light value, and a yellow-green for my lights. I
layered two of these colors at a time in a couple of places where I wanted to
suggest more than four values, but for the most part, you can see I kept it very
simple. I spent no more than ten minutes on this stage of the painting.
When I begin a painting, rather than reinterpret the scene from scratch, I
often use the sketch to guide my block-in. I realize that by doing this, any errors in the sketch will be
propagated to the painting. Sometimes I correct these as I go along, but
sometimes I elect to remain true to the errors in sketch on the assumption that
if I like the sketch, I will like the painting.
In this case, I was immediately faced with this issue as I realized I had
overstated the apparent height of the hillside to the left in my sketch. The way
I composed my sketch, and the painting, the bottom shoreline should go off the
left edge of the paper, not the bottom. I decided I preferred having the shore
go off the bottom, and left it that way. I could have recomposed the rest of the
painting to account for this while still being truer to the actual proportions
in the scene, either by cropping the painting at the bottom or by moving the
whole scene down, but I liked the arrangement of shapes in the sketch enough to
trust I could make them work in the painting.
 My personal
philosophy, one that probably comes from my experience as a jazz musician, is to
follow through with what I have started. Accidental deviations from my original
intention are not necessarily treated as mistakes, but simply elements to make
work within my painting. This is not to say I never fix mistakes or try to be
accurate - I also assume there was a reason I picked the scene in the first
place, and I try to be true to that as well. But I allow deviations to occur
when I decide I like them.
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