More Sketching as Compositional Development

Hi, my name is Stuart Loughridge. In this video, I wanna talk about compositional development. I'm an artist and I paint in oil paintings and watercolors. I'm also a printmaker, where I make copper plate etchings primarily, and also serigraphs. All the things I create, primarily landscapes, are created from a sketch that I do on location, so sketch is of the utmost importance to my practice. Carrying around sketch kits, going on walks and developing compositions, ideas for compositions, finding characters that can be in my paintings. So here I wanna talk about a plate that has been developed from a composition, and by plate, I mean an etching. So I'm gonna start here on the final image. This is a copper plate etching of a scene that I spent time in front of over numerous years, once a year at least, and I would go up to this spot and do sketches. So I'm gonna walk through the sketching process and how I got to this process. So here's a sketch that was created off of the color sketch I did on location. The color sketch was a small oil painting done in about 45 minutes time. The light was happening fast. The light was fading, it was a sunset. And from that oil painting, I developed this small pencil drawing. I was fond of this small pencil drawing, so I decided to pursue it further in a thumbnail form and see where it would go. I can't show you the original sketch that I did from life because I no longer own it, but I do have all the thumbnails to show you. So after I did this pencil drawing, which is on tone paper, using a pencil outline, and then pencil shading with a white highlight. From here, I just developed an ink drawing, because etching is a line work process that develops through, most of the time, through hatching or layering lines over one another. Pen and ink also imitates the etching process. So here I have a pen and ink drawing starting to play with the idea of how this could look in an etching form. And you can see I'm starting to figure out the single-hatch layers, the double-hatch layers, and the triple-hatch layers of line work, and also the foreground playing, maybe opening up this rock passage here, creating a calm pool. But I still don't have the background figured out, so I move on to the next sketch. This is more of a pencil outline sketch, which I talk about in the other videos and the importance of it. This sketch is working with topography and the gestures of the landscape. So I'm thinking about the forms and the directions of these planes and the growth of the trees, how they echo off one another. And I'm beginning to look into the background, which is often the most difficult part of a piece, to figure out how I can develop interest and lead the viewer back into the background without running into a wall of generality. Here in this little sketch, this is an important little sketch, this shows the essence of the darks or the shadows. So you can see that the light is coming from my left and hitting these trees, creating a shadow. These trees are casting a shadow on this main character. And then, this main character is also casting a shadow on these back trees. The whole foreground is dropped into shadow. So this is an important little thumbnail, it helped guide me through the process. From there, I did a more elaborate pen drawing and began working into the background a bit more to see if I can resolve how these background trees are going to come about, but I still haven't quite figured it out, but I think it was just ready to jump in and figure it out as I went, so then I began working on a copper plate. This is the first round of line work on a copper plate. The etching process is a laborious one, but essentially you're covering a copper plate with a thin ground of wax through a heat process. Once that wax is cooled, you can draw with a stylus point exposing the copper below. Wherever I expose the copper, that is where the lines will be etched into the plate when I dip it into a ferric chloride or acid solution. So the acid will determine the depth of the line, which is how long I leave it in the acid, and I determine where the line is placed into that wax-covered plate. So you can see here, this is all just a single round of line work, a single hatch. And if you go back to the thumbnails, you can see I'm starting to develop some rhythms through the background here, right here, that aren't quite in the sketches yet. This is a pretty blank background. But here I'm starting to develop the background and create this nice rhythm going through here and keeping ahold of my main characters. Then I go into the next ground, I reground the plate and I work on it again. And I do my second line of hatching, start developing some cloud work, I start crosshatching the lines that are already in there. In between each ground, I have to clean the plate, and then ink it with a black viscous oil-based ink and hand wipe it with scrim or tarlatan, and hand wipe all that ink off the plateau so the ink is only in the grooves. And then, I run that through bone-crushing pressure to transfer that image to a piece of paper, so that's what you're seeing here. So this is version number two. So then I reground the plate and I begin developing more line work. And I'm into a triple-hatch stage at this point, still sneaking up on the background and starting to develop the darks. If you go back to the first image, you see those same lines here holding through right here. Then I go into the fourth state of the plate and really start pushing in some layers and develop the sky more, starting to develop textures in the background really accenting outlines where I need it. As I discuss in one of the videos in my pencil drawing, coming back in and accenting outlines is really a way to create depth in a piece. So then by the fifth state, I'm really starting to pull this thing together. I'm starting to develop the textures I want. It's getting close, but it really needs to pop. So I work on it a little more and I think I finally get it close to being done. Compositionally, you have a big curve running through here. This is the vertical, and the strength of that vertical is accented by this spotlight at the very top. And there's a lot of rhythms that run through here, you could see, if we go back to that shadow sketch, you could see these cast shadows holding through the entire piece, and then the big shadow in the foreground. And then, a lot of burnishing work and tweaking. So I hope that illuminates why sketching is so important, at least in my process, and how these sketches are the seeds for all the work I do in the studio, thank you.