Sandy Neck oil painting

I started an oil painting of the Sandy Neck community I had done in pencil earlier. I had to deal with the same situation where the scene was far away and its apparent size too small to paint. I used the same approach of rotating the panel 90˚ and marking off salient features on the short side except instead of using the entire short end, I just used a bit more than 4" and constructed a rectangle of that height on the long side. This meant I could scale it up almost 3 times instead of 1 1/2 times with the 4" x 6" sketchbook page.

I wanted to change to overall aspect ratio of the panel, which I did using Duodecimator™, a gadget I devised some years ago. If you line it up with the short end of a 10" x 12" panel, it will show you where to crop it for a specific aspect ratio, I chose 9:16, which is used in film and video, and has some interesting proportional properties of its own.

1 Painting in its current state. I'm going o to let it marinate before making any more changes to it.

2 The setup with the panel rotated to do sight sizing on the short end.

3 closer look at the setup; still not close enough to see what I saw, which was the whole scene aligned with the section of the panel to the left of the clamp.

4 Closeup of the tick marks on the short end.

5 The panel rotated back to horizontal with the 4" x 12" rectangle, slope intercepts and scaled up reference marks at top.

6 Duodecimator™ in position with mark at 9:16 cut off point.

7 Panel with construction lines erased, tape marking off 9:16 rectangle, and scaled up reference point s along top side.

8 Horizon line draw in at about 1/5 height, reference point transferred to horizon, and sky background blocked in.

9 Painting setup with umbrella. I did three sessions; on the second day, the wind was so strong I couldn't use the umbrella to shade the panel, and worked under direct bright sunlight. I mostly worked on the water that day, so it has the equivalent of a different white balance to the rest of the painting.

Sight Scaling

Sometimes the area of interest I want to sketch is so distant and apparently small that it would be impossible to draw at sight size. Some years ago I devised this hack to scale it up, which I got to pull out of the toolbox yesterday to do this charming little village on the water on Cape Cod.

To start I rotated the sketchbook to the vertical orientation with the left end on top. Using CerviCarneTable to hold it at a constant distance from my eye, I made little tick marks indicating salient features on the edge of the paper. A few were labeled with initials, e.g. LH for Light House, BD for Big Dune, and LD for Little Dune.

I then rotated it back to horizontal, drew a diagonal from the lower left to upper right, and used a straight edge to draw horizontal lines from each tick mark to its intersection with the diagonal. Drawing vertical lines through each intersection gave me a scaled up set of reference points to place the buildings and other features on the page. I arbitrarily placed the horizon line about a third of the way up and eyeballed the proportions.

The relative size of the village in my overall field of view: 

Zoomed in to approximately the angle of vision implied by the sketch:

Turns out that that little village has an interesting history: https://www.capecod.com/lifestyle/sandy-neck-historic-colony-sandy-spit/

Spooky House

 I got to revisit a favorite subject, the spooky house next to the dentist's office, and do a quick sketch using #CerviCarneTable in the real world. I only had about 30 minutes and used them to sight size proportions and locate strategic points on the page. 

I then returned to the same site a few days later, with more time, and worked into the sketch again, truing up lines and adding details.

CerviCarneTable

 I often start a sketch in the wild by using sight sizing directly on the page to do the initial layout. I hold up the sketchbook to the scene and make little tick marks at the top and side to mark the coordinates of the big shapes and salient landmarks, then map them onto the the page.

Accuracy depends on keeping the distance between the eye and the drawing surface constant, and keeping the vertical and horizontal orientation plumb and level. I usually do this by the seat of my pants, but the complexity of that Mr. Cone sketch made me want to add some controls.

This is what I came up with - a backing to mount the sketchbook on, made out of three small hardboard pieces Velcroed together.

It can broken down and carried easily.

It is attached an adjustable strap around my neck.

PlumBobby is a simple inclinometer made of two bobby pins suspended from a binder clip and straddling a paper clip. If the sketchbook tilts out of the vertical plane, one of the bobby pins will rattle against the paper clip to alert me.

A sketch I started to test it out, and the same sketch cleaned up a bit. I wanted to get the proportions of the shed as well as its relationship to the little birdhouse on the left. 

This photo has more pronounced linear perspective than the sketch. I think that the mindset of mapping things onto the picture plane caused me to overlook the perspective, so that's just something to keep in mind.

I didn't even consider this when doing the original design, but it turns out to be easy to change to portrait orientation by simply rotating the middle panel 90˚ and adding a couple binder clips.

A quick test sketching a maple tree and front and back view of the whole assembly.

All in all, it worked pretty well. I think its utility merits a place in the sketching kit.

No project is complete with out a cute name. My current candidate is "CerviCarneTable," a portmanteau of cervical + carnet + table.

Mr. Cone

 Mr. Cone, Chicopee, MA

It was fun standing across the road sketching this iconic soft serve ice cream place, watching the customers come and go, and getting the beginnings of a summer vibe.

Bit of an homage to James Gurney and his eye for signage.

Forest Path

 Revisited this forest path.

It seems to be associated with some sort of construction or landscaping enterprise - whenever I visit, there is a different pile of refuse or building materials dumped back there.

Mansard House

 I hadn't gotten to do any outdoor sketching for a while, so it was fun to revisit the spooky old house next door to the dentist's office (they send you there if you don't floss).

Watercolor