PaintsightA thumbnail sketch is a small, fast drawing of a painting's big shapes in 3 or 4 values, made before you start. At 2 or 3 inches across there's no room for detail, so you can try several designs in a few minutes and paint the one that works.
Why small
At thumbnail size a face is a dot and a stand of trees is one shape. You can't fuss over detail, so the only decisions left are the ones that hold a painting together: where the big masses go, how big each one is, and which are light and which are dark. Arthur Wesley Dow put it bluntly in Composition: "no delicacy of tone, or harmony of color can remedy a bad proportion."
A thumbnail takes a minute or two, so a bad one costs nothing and you can try ideas you wouldn't risk on the canvas. A small picture is also seen whole, the way a painting reads from across a room.
Georges Seurat planned A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a canvas about 10 feet wide, with more than 20 painted studies. One, an oil sketch on a thin wood panel in the Art Institute of Chicago, is about 6 × 9½ in, and its figures are quite different from those in the finished painting: the studies were where he tried arrangements out.
Draw the frame in the canvas's proportions
For a 16 × 20 in canvas, draw a 2 × 2½ in box; for a 12 × 16, 1½ × 2 in. Everything in a thumbnail is placed against its frame, so a frame of the wrong shape plans a different painting.
If you haven't chosen the canvas yet, decide it here. Dow had his students set the same landscape in rectangles of different shapes, from nearly square to tall to long and narrow, to find the one that suited it.
Use 3 or 4 values
Harold Speed taught that most objects can be reduced to three tone masses: the lights, the half tones and the shadows. Leave the paper white for the lights, use a gray marker or light pencil for the middle value, and black or a soft pencil pressed hard for the darks. Add a fourth value only if the picture depends on it, such as a pale sky over a mid-value field. Past that, you're making a value study (see how many values a painting should have).
If the design itself is unclear, go down to two values first: a notan. Fill whole shapes with flat tone rather than outlining them. A line around a shape says nothing about whether it's light or dark, and that is the decision a thumbnail is for.
Make several, fast
Give each one a minute or two, and change one thing each time:
- Crop tighter or wider.
- Move the horizon up or down.
- Move the main subject, or make it bigger.
- Swap which big shapes are dark: a dark sky over light ground, then the reverse.
- Merge small shapes into their neighbors so there are fewer, bigger ones.
Make at least four before you choose. Dow's method was to compare and choose all the time, making many designs of one subject and keeping the best.
Choose the strongest
Put them side by side and look at them from arm's length or across the room. Then ask of each one:
- Does it read at a glance? If you can't tell what it is from a distance, there are too many shapes or they're too alike.
- Is one value in charge? Dow's principle of subordination relates every part to "a single dominating element", and he applied it to masses of dark and light. A design that is mostly light or mostly dark usually beats one with equal amounts of light, middle and dark.
- Where does the eye go first? The strongest contrast should be where you want attention. See how to create a focal point.
- Do the shapes connect? Darks that join into one big shape hold a picture together. Scattered spots of dark make it look busy.
If two are close, make each one a little bigger, or combine the best parts of both.
Working from a photo
A photo already has a design, and it isn't always a good one. Before you draw thumbnails, see what it has: open it in the notan and value study maker, set 3 values, and raise Simplify until only the big shapes are left. Try Natural, Balanced and Even grouping. Each splits the tones in a different place, so each suggests a different thumbnail. Tap a value to see every shape it covers.
Then draw your thumbnails, changing what the photo got wrong: join a dark that's broken into pieces, drop a bright spot that pulls the eye to the edge, darken a sky that's the same value as the land. The value study shows what the photo has. The thumbnail is where you decide what the painting will have.
The Paintsight app has a thumbnail view, which shows the reference at postage-stamp size, and notan options, which lay out several designs of the lights and darks side by side.
Scale it up
Rule a grid on the thumbnail with the same number of squares as the canvas grid. A 2 × 2½ in thumbnail with ½ in squares is a 4 × 5 grid, which matches 4 in squares on a 16 × 20 in canvas. Then copy the big shapes square by square, as in the grid method.
If you're drawing from the photo itself, grid the photo with the drawing grid maker and keep the thumbnail beside the easel for the values and the changes you chose. When the painting starts to look busy, check it against the thumbnail.
Sources
- Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition, ninth edition, 1914 (first published 1899): chapter III, "Ways of Creating Harmony", on subordination and on making many designs and choosing the best; chapter VI, "Landscape Composition", on proportion and on trying a landscape in rectangles of different shapes. Project Gutenberg.
- Harold Speed, The Practice and Science of Drawing, 1913, chapter IX, "Mass Drawing: Practical", on reducing objects to three tone masses. Project Gutenberg.
- Art Institute of Chicago, Georges Seurat, Oil Sketch for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte", 1884, oil on panel, 15.5 × 24.3 cm, and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884), painted 1884 to 1886, oil on canvas, 207.5 × 308.1 cm.
