Sandy Neck oil painting

I started an oil painting of the Sandy Neck community I had done in pencil earlier. I had to deal with the same situation where the scene was far away and its apparent size too small to paint. I used the same approach of rotating the panel 90˚ and marking off salient features on the short side except instead of using the entire short end, I just used a bit more than 4" and constructed a rectangle of that height on the long side. This meant I could scale it up almost 3 times instead of 1 1/2 times with the 4" x 6" sketchbook page.

I wanted to change to overall aspect ratio of the panel, which I did using Duodecimator™, a gadget I devised some years ago. If you line it up with the short end of a 10" x 12" panel, it will show you where to crop it for a specific aspect ratio, I chose 9:16, which is used in film and video, and has some interesting proportional properties of its own.

1 Painting in its current state. I'm going o to let it marinate before making any more changes to it.

2 The setup with the panel rotated to do sight sizing on the short end.

3 closer look at the setup; still not close enough to see what I saw, which was the whole scene aligned with the section of the panel to the left of the clamp.

4 Closeup of the tick marks on the short end.

5 The panel rotated back to horizontal with the 4" x 12" rectangle, slope intercepts and scaled up reference marks at top.

6 Duodecimator™ in position with mark at 9:16 cut off point.

7 Panel with construction lines erased, tape marking off 9:16 rectangle, and scaled up reference point s along top side.

8 Horizon line draw in at about 1/5 height, reference point transferred to horizon, and sky background blocked in.

9 Painting setup with umbrella. I did three sessions; on the second day, the wind was so strong I couldn't use the umbrella to shade the panel, and worked under direct bright sunlight. I mostly worked on the water that day, so it has the equivalent of a different white balance to the rest of the painting.