Framing your scene
‘How do you know what to paint?’ is a question I’m asked frequently. Not so much in the general sense (landscapes? Flowers? Portraits? Wildlife?), but in the context of looking at a huge panorama, for example, where there are multiple potential compositions, or where the view is so large that the prospect of condensing it down onto a single sheet of paper seems ridiculously insurmountable. The questioner confessed to me that they found such a rich vastness to be quite intimidating, and hadn’t a clue where to start.
To which my answer was this; start simple. Instead of looking at the big picture, try reducing the scale of your designs, and concentrating on just one small aspect, or element, of the scene. If you are faced with a view over a broad valley, for example, try scanning the view and internally prioritising what you see. Ask yourself the question; what is the one thing that jumps out at me? If something is catching your attention, then that is as good a place to start as any.
Another approach is to use something to frame your view, and restrict it in such a way that it helps you to visualise how it might be transposed and arranged onto a sheet of paper. One simple solution to this is to carry a small, ready-cut piece of mounting card in your kit, with a viewport that has similar proportions to the paper on which you normally like to work. If you don’t have such a piece of card, then try using your mobile phone camera as a viewer (take a photogragh or two while you’re at it… it really isn’t a sin). No card or camera? Then think about what film directors do when they are setting up a shot. You can create a simple viewport by holding both hands up in front of you, palms facing forwards, and thumbs stretched out, and down, each thumb and forefinger creating a 90-degree angle, forming at least the bottom part of a rectangular frame.
Finally; look for naturally occurring methods of framing a scene. Cables stretching across a street, or overhanging trees can help to reduce things down to a more manageable form
