Selecting the Best Composition for a Painting
After creating many, many designs I selected the composition of dancing Sandhill Cranes on the lower right. It has good motion, dynamics, overlapping images, and shows a more common relationship where some cranes dance and others watch. I reduced this sketch 50%, darkened the room and projected the image onto a 48″ x 60″ stretched canvas using my ancient opaque projector. Right in the middle of sketching the beamed image the projector light bulbs burned out and I was shocked not only to find replacement bulbs on my shelf, but dated 1989! The first bulbs lasted 20 years, amazing, a testimony to how little I use this system for sketching my work onto the canvas. Many times I just free from draw the subjects, but this time I wanted more control on such a big surface.
Gail Niebrugge, Alaska wildlife art