Prep Sketch

I didn’t have a whole lot of time for painting today, but I did get this prep sketch done, just to figure out some compositional ideas for a new painting. This is a reference from our walk yesterday evening. I really liked the upward angle, with the roofs of the building, and the pillars of cloud towering above it. The trees on either side frame the scene pretty well too. A lot of what I was trying to do here was take a scene that was a lot wider and condense the horizontal elements a bit. If you look at the reference photo below, you’ll see that all the different parts of the scene are a lot more spread out horizontally. I’m trying to get them all to fit in a slightly narrower aspect ratio - no particular reason for this other than that it just feels better to me that way.

-ZR