The photo I took is just a starting point; it’s a reference snapshot, not something I’m going to recreate slavishly on canvas. For a start, the skyline divides the photo in half -- a basic composition error. So I played around with a photo program on my computer, cropping the photo is various ways to see which I liked best.
I suspected I would go for an exaggerated landscape format, but did also try square variations. And changing the proportion of sky to land: what would it look like with minimal sky? How little land could there be while still retaining what had attracted me to the landscape in the first place? What did it look like upside down? And sideways? (This comes from just having watch a DVD on the British landscape artist John Virtue, who quotes someone as saying that “A-grade paintings” work whichever way you’ve got them up.)
I found myself wanting to keep the light green towards the bottom right-hand corner, but worrying about having an element that ended smack in the corner of the painting. But as it’s my landscape painting, I can of course just change that bit! So I extended the light-green part in the photo to see if this solved the problem.
