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.