Photoshop is a great tool for figuring out how to fix a painting.
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| Surf at Marshall Point, by Carol L. Douglas |
Yesterday I painted at Marshall Point. I was with Barbara Carr, who comes to Camden
just once a year. My intention wasn’t to create a masterpiece, but to spend a
few hours painting with a friend.
Marshall Point has a beautiful lighthouse,
which made a cameo appearance in the movie Forrest Gump. As
lovely as it is, I never paint it. I’m always mesmerized by the surf and the
light on the sea.
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| My sketch for the above. |
Barbara is an experienced painter, with a BFA from
Massachusetts College of Art and a lot of years of practice under her belt.
Still, I must be very tired. I’m usually a fast painter, but she finished two
fine paintings in the time I painted one.
Our tides may not be Bay of Fundy
class, but we still have high and strong tides here in mid-coast Maine. That
means the rocks are uncovered fast in an ebb tide and covered equally quickly
in a flood tide. The only answer to this is to draw fast and then use other
rocks to fill in the details. In general, this strategy allows a lot of
latitude for design, providing the artist is fully awake.
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| Lightening the foreground rocks did not help. |
I liked what I did well enough when we were on site, but was
ambivalent when I got it home. Comparing it to my sketch, I noticed two things.
I had centered the large rock slightly compared to my original composition. The
foreground in my sketch was darker than I’d originally proposed.
Adobe
Photoshop or a similar graphics editor can be a useful tool for pondering
possible revisions. I lightened the foreground rocks to see if that would help.
That left a dark rock sitting in a sea of blue—factually true, but hardly
interesting.
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| Cropping helped a little, but not enough to redeem the painting. |
Generally, plein air
painters use prepared boards in standard sizes. That means we’re at the mercy
of canvas and frame makers in determining our aspect ratio. (The alternative, customizing both frames and
boards, is just too much work.) “Aspect ratio” just means the proportional
relationship between the canvas’ width and height. A 9X12 canvas, for
example, has an aspect ratio of 3:4, making it exactly the same shape as a
12X16 canvas.
Of course, the sketch in my sketchbook is often a very
different aspect ratio. If I’m not careful—and I wasn’t—I can relocate things
to where they don’t belong when I transfer my idea to a larger board.
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| Common canvas shapes. |
I cropped my image to see if moving the rock more to the
right would help. Again, I don’t think it made much difference.
The real issues are more fundamental: the rocks and the
waves are resolutely parallel to the picture frame, and all the action is below
the mid-line. Another rock, middle-right, will do this painting a world of good. So will tightening up the edges of the waves. Those are easy fixes. I can do them in my sleep, and possibly will.
