Keith here today. I'm writing this from the deck of the luxury cottage we rented to run our Muskoka Art Retreat. The students have finished their three days and have gone home with their new paintings. I'm looking over the small sketches I did over the past few days and am thinking about large canvases. Once in a while one of our small works simply calls out to be enlarged. When it does, we take off our plein air hats and move into the studio, pull out a big surface and give it a go. I've done quite a few big versions of smaller works and have come up with a few "rules" to guide me:
11 x 14 to 24 x 36 As you can see, I kicked up the colour, eliminated objects, added more power to the sky and tried to recreate the feeling I had looking at this slice of the Canadian landscape. In the following pair, I wanted to take my already somewhat loose painting and take it to an almost abstract vision. 12 x 16 to 30 x 40 The next two paintings are by Helen. She felt she cropped the original scene too tightly and lost some of the drama of the path in the woods, so from memory and her original painting, she "backed up" and created a deeper version with more vivid colours. She tells me it's a work in progress. 12 x 16 to 30 x 40 I don't always explore new ground with a painting. In the following case, a number of people asked me to paint a larger version of the original sketch, which I did, without trying for anything new. It was accepted into the Quest Spring Juried show and subsequently sold. Similar, but different. 12 x 16 to 16 x 20 Just for fun, I also painted a scaled down version. 12 x 16 to 8 x 10 I hope these "rules" help you in your next enlargement project. Have you enlarged any of your smaller paintings? Do you have any insights you can share?
Keith
6 Comments
Erness Wild
9/7/2012 07:24:41 am
I dare you to do a larger version adding much more detail than the smaller version.
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Keith Thirgood
9/9/2012 05:48:39 pm
Hi Erness,
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9/16/2013 06:07:34 pm
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11/10/2013 06:37:44 pm
If my wish was to do full painting, then I would have painted my small painting with more features, and my larger ones would have had more detail as well. As my goal is to capture the essence of a prospect with as small detail as likely, to add extra detail as an afterthought would be counter intuitive
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Keith ThirgoodIs an artist working in the Canadian, post impressionist style. I paint en plein air when I can and in the studio the rest of the time. Archives
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