Winter Sub Division

Seeing as I'm really trying not to watch paint dry, I've been trying to occupy my creative time with other projects. Today I spent some time working on the ideation stage of another winter landscape scene. I'm still champing at the bit to be done with these portraits (tomorrow's the day). I really like the way the sunlit snow on the roofs of the sub-division are so bright. The brightest element of the scene, really. There are also some wonderful leading lines via roads and field edges that lead to the houses, and the woods make for some wonderful framing devices as well. I think that for such an everyday scene, it's got a lot of compositional potential. The painting is basically divided into three horizontal zones: sky, woods/houses, and foreground field. The sky and field are middle values, and the woods/houses form a great light/dark pattern where the lightest lights and darkest darks smash up against each other to form a pretty powerful center-of-focus. They also lead to that tree in the foreground, which connects to the leading lines towards the sub division again.

-ZR