Canyon Painting

I wanted to try a new way of quickly getting thumbnails and building up an image that wasn't John J. Parks method but still maintain a loose feeling. I remembered a video that I once watched by Feng Zhu that used a loose way of creating many thumbnails fast and efficiently with colour. I tried using this method a few years ago but wasn't quite skilled enough to be able to control the image and turn it into what I wanted. I decided to give it another go now that I'm more confident with my skills and have a better understanding of how to build up a painting.

I started each thumbnail with a loose sketch only marking out areas of interest or key shapes that would help guide they eye or frame the piece. I didn't get tied down with detailing the sketch, I wanted to have a clear shape that would read well when standing far away or blurring the eye. The use of colours in the photos used helped highlight certain areas in lighting areas of importance early on. I made sure to blur and distort all the images that I used butting them under my initial sketch as to not loose focus on what I wanted the thumbnail to be. Some thumbnails went better than other and that was to be expected. I wanted this starting process to be quick so that I could have a few thumbnails to choose from when going onto the next stage of starting to build up.

My first attempt didn't go so well. I wasn't able to pull vibrant colours and started painting too tightly as a result of knowing the painting wasn't going in the direction I wanted. Also the main point of interest didn't really stand out like I had imagined it doing. I believe this is because alot of the rocks in the piece seemed a similar height so I didn't stand out that way. Also the colour wasn't that vibrant and it didn't have anything interesting going on because of it.

I decided to try again and learn from this failed piece and chalk it up as a learning experience.I picked a similar thumbnail for my second attempt so that I could apply what I had learned. I knew that I wanted the thumbnail to be alot brighter than it was to start working from so I duplicated the layer and changed the layer and opacity setting until I had the desired affect. I then made sure to keep my painting style looser and kept my canvas zoomed out so that I wouldn't get tempted to add details in too soon. This helped to keep the painting looser.