Five-minute sketches

(C) 2016 Dale DiMauro

While on our vacation in Maine we took many photographs. Some definitely have inspired me. Even on the trip I was often thinking of ways I would compose a painting. Should I go with a horizontal format or a vertical one? How big should the picture be? Should the focal point be off center or even in the lower right corner? What should I include and what should I exclude?

The evolution of these sketches originated when we visited the Maine Audubon Society, which is in Portland, with lovely mowed passages running through meadows and woodland trails, providing shoreline views amongst mature oaks. 

We came upon a young girl taking a break, wearing a white t-shirt against this mass of dark spruce trees, with a distant estuary behind her. Her upright posture against all this dark growth was quite a contrast. With all these cool shadows projecting across the ground from nearby trees it was the perfect picture in of itself.

I had evolved to thinking that the best composition is a horizontal format where the focal point, in this case, is this girl placed in the right foreground. By placing her off-center, the picture attains a more relaxed feel, yet includes the distant landscape in contrast to the dark evergreens in the foreground on the right.