What are the drawings?

Years ago I would take a canvas, sketch directly onto it, and then get painting. Very quickly I found that got slow, and sometimes made me struggle with the scale of a painting.

So next, I started to do casual little sketches in a notebook, and scribble dimension calculations on the side. Sometimes I would fill grids full of patterns of numbers that referred to colors, if that was the kind of painting I was doing. This was all an improvement.

But in the last few years, I’ve realized that it’s better to be much more detailed with planning - so I do scale drawings of what I want to create, and paint sheets of color palettes before I get started.

I probably should have started this way, but it seems planning is something that develops as I find it’s necessary…

As it turns out, I quite like the scale drawings as little works on their own - so that’s what they are! Making them is both meditative and stressful (once I start using a pen, any mistake will mean starting again from scratch), which is nice. And to be able to “finish” something I like in a few hours rather than weeks feels good too.