Pencil Sketch at Castle Island

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Hi.  I have attached a rough sketch entitled Toward the Light.  As soon as you are creating reasonable sketches you could potentially paint from I recommend you add a title to your piece.  This will remind you of the reason you are painting this in the first place.  Please notice that there are only a couple of big shapes in this sketch.  I was drawn to the interesting sky shape formed by the tree shapes protruding into the light sky.  So there is a light abstract shape at the top intertwining with several dark organic shapes (all different for variety.) The bottom of the scene was a rather large midtone.  You should break up any shape that is too large.  In this case, I borrowed a road from nearby and put it in at an angle which would break up the space and create the illusion of moving upward.  This will be graded in the painting stage to create even more variety.  Plato defined art as having unity in the variety and variety in the unity.  This means there must be enough the scene to be cohesive in terms of shapes, colors, texture, etc. but enough variety as to not be boring.  That's where the two figures come in.  This scene needed a focal point so I made up my two painters going for their subject hunt over the hill.  It's ironic that this typically happens:  An artist will overlook a simple, workable composition to go searching for something they think will magically appear over the next hill.  Ah, it's a wonderful hobby.   See you soon. Bob

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Attached Files   

Towards the Light.jpg

BobbyFarrell

May 23, 2009

1.05 MB