After the french village post-mortem I was musing about how to go about simplifying my buildings paintings. Going smaller was my first thought and all of these are done in a 5″x7″ Strathmore sketchbook. The paper isn’t my favorite by a long chalk but it dries very quickly and forces me to work fast. I wanted to do multiple copies of a fairly simple Joseph Zbukvic painting and see if I could get better at seeing the big shapes and get the values.
So 4 small paintings done in a couple of hours. You can see how things changed over the 4 paintings. The first one is a little bitty. I’m not getting the big value areas well and the colors are a little slapdash. Paintings 2,3, and 4 are much better in both regards. It was a really worthwhile exercise to do. Seeing them all together shows a big difference to me. Strangely I didn’t notice any difference as I was painting them.
Here’s the original Zbukvic image – lovely isn’t it?
