Uptown Baptist Painting #1

Uptown Baptist Church - thumbnails

     This is the first in-process shot of the painting as it progressed from tiny thumbnails to sketched onto the canvas.  Thumbnails are amazing little tools that you create yourself.  They are a vital step to creating almost any successful painting.  Anytime you are conceiving an image in your mind there are always tons of ways that the image can be done, with almost infinite subtle or drastic design changes.  The thumbnail stage is your opportunity to really play around with shapes and values without committing a lot of time or wasting any paint. 

Pencil sketch of thumbnail onto canvas.

     From this point, I decide which composition is going to fit this image the best and ideally this is the point to gather (or preferably) shoot your reference.  In this case, I was given some pictures to use as reference.  Personally, I wanted to go to Chicago and shoot my own reference, but that sadly wasn't in the budget (maybe next time).  I gathered my pictures together and using my thumbnail as a guide I sketched the drawing onto the canvas.  This stage can really go one of two ways, very loose or very tight and detailed; for this painting, I was under a tight deadline and needed to get into the paint right away.  In hindsight, I should have taken the time to really draw out some of the more detailed areas for clarity when I got to the painting stage, but you live and learn. 

     So this is where I'll leave off for today.  Check back for the next stage - the color block-in and underpainting.

Thanks for following along and as always if there are any questions please leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer them!