Cropping

 

5/16/22 Wedgwood on trash day

I’ve noticed a pattern: Whenever I make a composition study and then try to make a full-size, color sketch afterwards of the same composition, I lose steam. It feels like I’ve already made the sketch, and the freshness is gone. It’s a problem that I need to resolve if I want to learn from the obviously valuable tool of making thumbnail studies.

Seeing a potential sketch in the Wedgwood neighborhood, I dutifully started making a composition study first. I observed the values and put in the prominent lines, but then I stopped without filling in the shapes and values. I wondered if that would keep the process fresh enough for me that I could make the “real” sketch.

Indeed, that did seem to do the trick – I still had enough to do that I hadn’t already done in the thumbnail, and that made the sketch fun (at left). When I had finished, though, I realized I hadn’t paid attention to the much-tighter cropping I had done in the thumbnail – even though that was a significant part of observing the composition.

Cropped to match the thumbnail study at left

Much of what Ian Roberts talks about is cropping – doing it tightly enough that unnecessary details are eliminated, which strengthens the value masses and other shapes that lead the eye through a composition. After I got home, I decided to crop my sketch digitally (at right) to match the thumbnail I had originally made. I hate to lose the top of that tree in the background, but I do like that the trash cans are less centered. Cropping more tightly changes the focal point, though: Now it’s all about the trash cans, and that wasn’t my intention. Maybe what I was missing at the (incomplete) thumbnail stage was knowing where I wanted the focal point to be.

Unfinished study