Plein air idea 2

Sorry, I an writing this with a connection that  is too weak  to put up a picture. Imagine if you would, a picture here. The picture is of half a dozen or so tiny sketches done with a thick pencil line  using a chiseled   edged carpenters pencil with a soft lead. Each of these drawings is about the size of a playing card and are all drawn on a ringbound sketchbook of good quality paper.

Thumbnail drawings are the highest form of previsualization. They are little practice paintings of the subject before the artist in the field. Each of the thumbnails has a different "take" on the subject. It either stresses one element of the scene over the others, or it is a simplification of the masses  presented in a large attractive design.
Often the last two are more resolved versions of one of the previous entry's that seemed promising.

There are several advantages to doing this.

• you will have a better large design because things done small often look good "blown up" in scale. They often look simpler, which is almost always good..
• You will have examined different "takes" on the arrangement.One thumbnail might emphasize one part  of the landscape,a different thumbnail, a different aspect. Looking across a farm scene, one thumbnail might make the painting about the barn and the copse of trees around it, and the other might subordinate the farm buildings to the larger valley scene in which they are set.
• You will hopefully have encountered the hidden gremlins waiting to be a problem in the painting later on. Instead of being ambushed you may have said "this is a great view, but it has a big problem! What am I going to do about that? "
• Here is the big one though. It is often easy to show up on a location and paint the  "regular" arrangement of the subject, or perhaps just that inflicted on you by an awkward or overly symmetrical  static set of shapes before you in nature. Your first thumbnail was probably that arrangement, the one that would show what was present before the artist. One of the later thumbnails  progressed from that to a more creative arrangement or simply AN ARRANGEMENT .It's not the first picture you would have shown up and made. It is more like what you would have made the third or fourth time you painted the location.

I look at doing thumbnails as a chore, I do them sometimes. I went through a long period where I did them for every painting, I don't do them often now. I probably would be better off if I did, lots of really great landscape painters did thumbnails, but I can also show you a lot of fine painters who didn't. I have made a whole lot of paintings. I would recommend that you thumbnail things for a year or two and decide whether it is something you want to do. You will learn a whole lot about arranging your paintings by doing this.