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I don't think I've ever prepared so much for a painting. But it pays off, and I've really learned the importance of thumbnails. But more importantly, I've learned how to manipulate my thumbnails, number of shapes, values, moving what's in the way, drawing the eye to my focus. 

So this article is really for the painting nerds like me who love the process of creating even more than the finished product! Here are the links to previous attempts at this painting, and the final result:

http://mhbd.blogspot.com/2020/05/these-are-not-easy-ucd.html

http://mhbd.blogspot.com/2020/06/more-thumbnails-need-to-move-on.html

http://mhbd.blogspot.com/2020/06/out-of-my-comfort-zone.html

And these were the last thumbnails I did before actually starting to paint. I find it really useful to make notes to myself about what needs to be done. If I didn't write those things down, I'd probably repeat the same mistakes over and over!

And here are colour swatches, my favourite bit!

And some previous thumbnails that helped me realise the compositional idea I had was completely wrong!

One of the hardest concepts for me is to figure out the temperature of a painting, cool or warm. I don't have an iPad with Procreate, so I downloaded Paper on my phone. I used to love that app, and then one day things got more sophisticated and I kind of forgot about it. But it's got a great colour picker tool, and when you pick a colour, it gives you the colour, the saturation and the value, which helps me then get a feeling for the overall temperature of the scene.