In this video blog, artist Kit Glaisyer walks through the initial stage of creating a new panoramic painting. He prepares a 40 × 100 cm (16 × 40 in) canvas with a rough surface, then projects a computer‑stitched collage of four photographs onto the canvas to map out the basic composition. He outlines the underlying structure by marking key light and dark areas, especially the sky, while leaving the foreground ground blank for now. Glaisyer notes that the projected image’s proportions are slightly altered, and that the composition will evolve—trees, leaves, and other features will be moved or changed as the painting progresses. The monologue serves as a concise, instructional overview of his workflow for establishing a strong compositional foundation before adding detailed color and form.
Chapters
Right then, this is a new canvas that I've prepared. You can see it's about 40 by 100 centimeters, 16 by 40 inches. It's just stuck with a nice rough surface. And this is going to start with this, which is a photo collage I prepared on the computer. You can see I've stitched 4 paintings together— sorry, 4 photographs together and changed the colours a bit. And then basically that goes into a computer, into a laptop, which is around the side there, and then into my projector. And let's see in there. Here we are on the canvas. So now if I turn out the light, we've got a rather nice projection on there. It's not exactly the same proportions as the original. I've kind of extended the top part, you can see, artificially. I've got other photographs which I can reference for the leaves, but basically that's it. So this is basically for the basic composition of the painting. I like to make sure that there's a sort of underlying structure, and I'll bring in the key components, areas of light and dark, particularly obviously the sky, I'll leave the foreground just bare ground for now. And then obviously the painting is going to change a lot in the process of making it, so trees will be moved around, features will be changed, but it's nice to have this strong foundation to start with basically. Okay. Okay, so here we have it. The first stage in this new painting. So I've just been quite loose just to get the main shapes of the painting, the composition. Element of the path here. Obviously the colors are not at all correct, but it doesn't matter. I've left out elements of the sky because they're not really clear. I just mapped them in on the image so I didn't get distracted, but I'll be working with that area a bit more. Yeah, that's it for tonight, I think.
