Sky Pads 33 part 2

Sky Pads 33 with the rest of the bottom half (maybe) finished.

You can see now that the general scheme here is a progression of the leaves on a diagonal from bottom right to upper left. This wasn’t obvious in my last post unless you enjoy squinting at faint drawing lines to guess where things are going.

The neat thing about progress so far is you can see how the images get more transparent and let more “light” through from the background as they enter the brighter space. For the next chunk I will turn the canvas upside down to continue painting. There’s no ulterior motive here, it’s all simply practical because I haven’t used an easel in decades–I always paint flat on a large table. I am also a short person with not even a semblance of gorilla-length arms. So in order to comfortably reach the upper levels of a large canvas and not end up with a kink in my back, I turn the canvas upside down on the table. There’s also a benefit to this. I can easily see where things are about to go wrong and fix them as I compare my drawing to my original source material. My eyes always calculate better when my brain doesn’t get in the way trying to tell my eyes what it thinks they’re supposed to see. Plainly, I see exactly what’s there. It’s an ancient artist’s trick which has always worked well for me.

If you’d like to have some fun with upside down, find a photo of a famous face (one you know you would easily recognize) and turn it upside down. You will probably easily see that if you didn’t already know who it was you would have a difficult time recognizing it. The same thing goes for lily pads. I can concentrate on the actual shape rather than what my brain is telling me it “should” look like.