Advanced Doodles

After the last couple of craft shows, I realized that people really do like my concept paintings of landscapes. The part that they like the most is the fact that it is not your traditional oil painting landscape that are produced by a lot of other artists. There are much better landscape painters than me, but I like to think that I provide a unique twist to them.

The current painting that you see is one still in progress. it is based on some photos that I took when I was in northern Vermont. The question from a lot of people at a craft/art show is: how do I come up with the final painting?

When I am not working on a traditional landscape or still life, I like to doodle. The random act of lines crossing each other produces some interesting effects and, eventually, leads to a final painting concept. In the following drawing, you see my basic steps:

The first step is to just start drawing random lines. From there, (2) shows that I got the vision of some sort of landscape lines moving out to something in the background. (3) I abandoned that overall lines, but decided that the the 'S' shape with the landscape plane in the background was potentially more interesting. (4) Shows that I started subdividing the landscape into two distinct areas, land and some clouds in the distance. (5) produces more clouds with some sort of abstract shapes at the base of the clouds/land. (6) I start getting more refined. The clouds begin to look more like bunched trees and then I get the concept of splitting the land in two levels.

The final drawing (7) shows that a more refined drawing into the final concept. In this case, I have the traditional landscape on the bottom of the painting, but a ledge that contains an abstract shape with a closer view of the trees.

As you can tell from the painting in progress, I still follow the general concept, but makes changes as the mood suits me.