When traveling or watching TV, I sometimes doodle on a tablet app. It has wakened me up to several things. One, laying down color and then erasing around or through it to create shapes. Two, layering color. Three, accidental blending. Four, just the freedom to do any old thing and not be concerned about wasting materials. After all it's just bits and memory.
When I was unsure about how to try something on a canvas, I took a picture and imported it into the app and then used the color matching function to test out various corrections or changes. . Some worked, others didn't. In the process I also learned a bit about color matching and tonality.
For most of my life as a painter I never used black or Payne's gray. I also didn't using any mixing white. A few years back, when I started using that Julien easel, I began to use both a good deal and liked the results a lot.
On a recent trip I took a small kit of watercolors and worked on a few scenes of the NYC stone and glass corridors. I have a way to go before I get to the facility that lets me be as free as I am with the tablet app. But I really valued how much simpler and more portable it is. I just need to get free enough to try some of the ways of working with the tablet on a sheet of watercolor paper.
Forty years ago, a teacher encouraged me to find "The Painter's Secret Geometry" Recently I discovered PSG was back in print - for a while, I only saw lending copies and rare book offerings. It has some very interesting descriptions and analyses of how line and proportion are used across different eras in art. Until I found PSG I tried to use techniques in the Elements of Dynamic Symmetry. This started several years ago in larger work using some basics in the EDS book, such as setting the mast and horizon in the Triage painting.
So now I am trying out some of the pieces in the PSG. The upper scene-in-progress is built on top of a grid roughly resembling what is shown in the lower grid.
