"Helping" All Drawn Out and Ready to Go

22 x 30, Fabriano Artistico Rough paper

There was no way I was going to draw out all those flowers and stuff, so effort concentrated on the 3 subjects and some of the shadow shapes so I don't forget about them.  This and the next stage are my favorite parts of painting, where all potential lies ahead and no screw-ups have yet occurred.  

"Helping" - Color Study

8 x 6 wc study

The purpose of this is to try out colors in a small format, see if anything bugs me, and to warm up with the paint and the image.  Where will edges be hard, soft, rough or removed altogether?  Is there too much white that should be tinted back?   And so on.... The hospital chose to commission a 22 x 30 full sheet watercolor  based on this study (remember, guidelines were Norman Rockwell, Americana, nostalgia). 

"Helping" - A Watercolor in Progress

Visual thinking in the sketchbook

Values

Sometimes while at work I have time to work out my ideas

for a painting.  On the left are notes and possible formats, movement, where to put the forms and how big.  On the right sketchbook page I dinked around with wc pencils and whiteout.  Next came the value sketch, just to check the shapes; although this usually happens before the color thinking.  I like to simplify it into a notan (Japanese word meaning black and white design) and then see if I can get to as few shapes as possible.  Counting just the large shapes, there are 5; putting in a few of the smaller shapes brought the count to 8, which is well under the goal of no more than 13.  So, this looks like it will work.