My dog tore up my camera. Sigh. So, recently I have been shopping for a new camera.

When I started painting, I always worked from life. A couple of years ago I realized that working from life, although it is a great way to work, severely restricted the types of poses I could paint. I wanted to paint movement — crowds of people, skateboarders in mid-air, dancers, and revelers. I bought a point and shoot camera. It worked well enough, but it had some drawbacks. Maybe it was a blessing when Lucy ate my camera because the old camera gave me a chance to learn what to look for in a camera for reference photographs.

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Sometimes I want to create sketches at a small scale before do start a watercolor on a large sheet of paper, and I want the proportion of the sketch to match the proportion for the large sheet. Here’s a simple calculator that will figure out the dimensions you should use in your sketchbook.

For example, suppose you are planning to do a 22″ x 30″ painting, and your sketchbook is 8.5×11. Enter the numbers in the form, click the “Calculate!” button, and you will see that you will need to crop your sketchbook page to 8.07 x 11 to keep the proportion the same as your full sheet.

I’m having trouble getting this to work inside the blog. If you’re interested, take a look at it on my other website.

I had noticed for several months ago that the light and shadow on an object can change very suddenly and dramatically. This phenomenon was especially noticeable around 1:30 in the afternoon. I figured that the sun must shift from the east side of the sky to the west side of the sky around 1:30. My solution was simply to plan for a lunch break around 1:30. Everything worked fine until yesterday, when I was working in the morning and experienced the same sudden shift in lighting. I decided it was time to learn more about exactly how the sun tracks across the sky.

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