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Sunday, November 13, 2005

Going from Small to Big

Taking a small plein air piece and expanding on it to create a larger work is fraught with issues. "Just use a bigger brush," folks say. I suspect they say it tongue-in-cheek, because once you get started, it's a lot harder than you'd think -- even if you do use bigger brushes.

Issues:


  • How do you recreate the energy that you immersed yourself in when you made the smaller painting?
  • How do you not "generalize" what you've already recorded?
  • How to you keep areas of seeming-emptiness, which will become only larger and more intimidating, interesting?
  • How do you avoid losing interest in what you're doing?


Advantages:

  • You have the opportunity to improve your vision -- improve composition, improve color use, improve focus.
  • You also have the opportunity to REVISE your vision.
  • You can fine-tune your skills over days, weeks and months without worrying about the light changing in two hours.


All this bears exploring.