Talking to other painters, it’s a common theme.  Most of us came to painting with a need for self expression, but also a desire to make things look real.  Myself, I was preoccupied with an interest in figures and faces. I spent most of my early days obsessed by details.  I learned though, that a pile of details don’t make a painting.  Eventually, I wound up very dissatisfied with many of my efforts.  No matter how nice the specifics were, if I lost the sense of what I was saying, the painting was a failure.  I learned that with painting it’s all about the big picture. 

So, I took the good advice to study the masters.  What was it exactly that made these great paintings work?  Sure, simple, right? ...compelling subjects, good compositions, nice color harmony ...a little flair with the brush....  Well, what a long interesting path.  Without beleaguering the details, I realized by distillation that a successful portrait, landscape, figure study... you name it... is really, also, a successful abstract.

In order to internalize these illusive rules of painting, I’ve taken my weakest suit and put my attention there.  Over the years I’ve piled a mountain of once nice sketching pads and filled more than a bathtub with watercolor pigments, creating landscape sketches, working towards successful abstracts.  But now I’ve discovered a different method! 

I’ve put my wasteful carbon footprint a little further from view by using my computer!  I’ve now come to enjoy hashing out ideas on Photoshop! (I apologize.  This is not a plug.  I’m sure there are many other programs that would work fine for this type of exercise.  Photoshop is just a good one, and I already have it.)  So, late at night,  I doodle with the mouse. 

To give ample ammunition to those who would recoil from such a practice, I’ve pasted a recent one here, My private Florida ...a fun one. 

I started with an unlikely key color and built shapes out of interesting value and temperature changes, working back and forth to the compliment, blue-green.  By dumping areas of color and then fine tuning, changing hues and light values, I was able to explore compositional ideas, stretches in harmony, and in the case of the little green spot (a building?) an element of surprise! 

The great thing about this type of sketching is that I don’t waste a lot of materials, but also, it can lead to a better understanding of what works.  In this realm a flamboyant brush stroke can’t save me.  The colors and shapes have to work.