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.
Exercise: Altering Value Shapes
