Rob Adams a Painter's Blog painter's progress

I often see artists vaguely waving their brush at arm’s length when painting and measuring by sliding their thumb down the handle. It looks very good to passers by and perhaps makes a marginal improvement the proportions in their painting. However the picky pedantic bit of me notes that they have not dropped their head onto the shoulder of their outstretched arm or closed one eye. This means they have never learnt how to do measuring and the distances they are checking will be pretty inaccurate.

The very first thing about measuring is what and when should you measure? If it is a bunch of trees or other shrubbery then do we care if a painting has accurate shrubbery in it? You never hear people say, “That’s a pretty good painting, but a pity the clump of rhododendrons is out of proportion…”. So when it comes to hills, mountains, trees and general greenery I just use the diagonal method which is estimating the box the target will fit within and then finding the angle from corner to corner as below.

Once you have that angle you can scale it any way you wish.

Something that might need a little more accuracy is how the verticals of buildings fit across your picture. For this I use a version of the sight size method. If you hold up your painting board so that it exactly covers the area of your proposed masterpiece, then without moving it nearer or further away slide the whole board downwards  or upwards and you will be able to mark where the verticals divide the picture along the top or bottom of the board. The same can be done with horizontals if you slide the board sideways. I usually only knock in the top and bottom of the box that encloses the structure rather than any internal lines which are usually effected by perspective in any case.

Here is my board covering the composition I want.

Slide up and mark key points.

Once you have those then join up the dots. I am not aiming for perfect accuracy only reasonably correct proportion.

Taking angles, which I have already mentioned, deserves a little more attention. It is not always straight forward to transfer an angle from a brush held against the subject to your canvas. Firstly it is not a bad idea to mark a toe line, just scratch a mark on the ground to set where you will place your feet when you make any measurements. Next, when measuring make your canvas vertical and as near eye level as you can. Transferring an angle to a sloping board is not impossible but much harder! Remember, drop that head to the shoulder to get your eye as near to the line of your fully stretched out arm as possible.

I frequently use angles as a quick check against distance measures, make a box around the bit you want to check the proportion of and if they don’t match then rechecking is required.

If you are doing a really complex scene think about using a thread frame, it looks seriously uncool and everyone will mutter cheat, but it is really no different than measuring piece by piece. You need to hold up the frame so that the right number of squares covers your subject. A trick is to note a left and right feature in your scene so you can reposition the frame easily, or you can even better set it up on a stand. Either way you will need to mark your toeline so you keep your position consistent. Some even go so far as to set an eye point which can just be a pole stuck into the ground coming up to an eye level point.

My thread frame is a very basic 14in by 10in with the threads at inch intervals. I have a larger one with 2 inch threads which I use in the studio, so if I am painting from a reference or sketch I can grid it up and transfer the drawing. Again people feel this is somehow cheating but Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt and Michelangelo all used this method and everyone knows that they are rubbish! One thing you will find is that after a while you develop a sort of internal grid and so need the real thing less and less.

I have managed to print off a few of my linocuts with my new press. So much easier than a barren and wooden spoon!

This is my local the Baker Arms in Child Okeford. Just two plates.

This is a slightly more stylised one of the church at Kington Magna. The way the lino cuts really lends itself to this sort of treatment. I pushed the boat out with 3 plates on this one. I also did a much more worked out preparatory drawing.

My new press allows me to print on paper that would be very laborious with a barren. I wanted to use the black key plate and try and get a very different feel with the same image. I added the white by hand, but I could have cut a white block.  Next I am attempting an MDF cut!

This is a version of my more monochrome tonal sketch of Dorchester I posted previously. I wanted a more up beat feel. Oil, 16in by 12in.

I went down to the coast to draw Old Harry rocks. By the time I finished drawing the light was almost gone but I couldn’t resist a try at this nearby sea stack. The light went over so quickly I only got a very basic block out done, so this is much more studio than plein air. I ended up making it quite different from both the block in and the photos I took, so this is how it felt in my memory rather than how it actually was! 12in by 12in oils.

Here is Old Harry rocks. Sitting with my feet almost dangling over the edge here! As I drew the sun came through and lit the chalk cliffs very dramatically, but I felt it looked better a bit before the sun reached its flu strength. Pen and Ink.

I have a one man show at The Gallery on the Square in Poundbury it rune until the 18th of October 2016.