Precrastination ..... Familiarity Breeds Contempt!

Precrastination ...... hhhmmmm, no not procrastination; procrastination sounds so active like proactive or prolific or profit, I'm precrastinating. The saying goes that ''familiarity breeds contempt'', over the winter landscapes and I had become contemptuous of one another. My familiar haunting grounds showed me lots of greys and the same old scenes and I refused to be baited by them, boring! I waded into waves and seascapes and springs but landscapes and I went our separate ways. What with the drier days however, I've been out and about sketching and contemplating my surroundings with the eyes of a landscape lover. Wonderful, nope not really I'm precrastinating! How, what, why, where! 

Good start is always a prep sketch or bare minimum a thumbnail. This is a view I've been eyeing up recently ..... pros and cons? 

Starting with the pros, I love the sweep of the planted furrows on the left of the tree, I like the tree(s) in the middle  although mid position is against ''the rules'' I like it here. Now for the cons! 

I was sketching really at this level and I love those grasses at the front. The traffic sign won’t make it into the painting:)) but as you can see there are some other cons! These are some of the compositional problems that face you often when working en plein air. You like the motif but it has a couple of difficulties. The large tree which I like hides an uneven horizon, we have more distance on the left because the trees on the right are shielding us from the true horizon. This is a big nono, and always reads oddly, a good example of this is the Mona Lisa, take a peek. 

Second problem, that curtain of trees on the right, dense, dark and the cut off point is directly at our focal point, hmmmm, not good. So some ''Precrastination'' is called for, how do I solve these compositional problems in my painting? The uneven horizon could run from left to right and be seen slightly peeking through the trees on the right, which I would soften and lighten with lots of ''air holes'. 

This is a good example too of how photography flattens scenes, there is virtually no difference in values in the trees which definitely were visible to my eye. The mid ground has lost definition too. 

You see precrastinating can help you solve a lot of visual, compositional problems in your mind before putting pastel down on that expensive support and while you are painting in your head your sketch may appear more realistic than you thought!