From photograph to thumbnail sketches - soft pastel medium

Most of my landscape paintings are inspired by NATURE.

Over a period of years, I have shortlisted a whole lot of photographs for my future artworks.
The intention is to create Landscape paintings as and when I get time. Therefore I decided to
create a series of thumbnail sketches which will help me visualize the final outcome as
the painting will look on completion.

Thumbnail sketch or study sketch is "The most important deciding factor for me" to go ahead
with the final painting procedure. I have used charcoal and water colour medium too for
creating these small study works but this time around I have used only soft pastels. The size
is more or less, always 4" X 5".

Given below are four thumbnail sketches created by referring to photographs taken by me
on different locations.

Thumbnail sketches

Created on Fabriano Elle erre paper

and Canson Mi Teintes paper.

After completing the thumbnail sketches, I analyse the final colours, values, composition etc

which helps me to decide whether to go ahead with the painting or redo the thumbnail sketch

by making the required changes. 

The upper two sketches turned out fine as planned in the mind but the lower two were a bit complicated scenes with a whole lot of overlapping elements. So the technique and steps that I followed did not quite work out. Therefore I may have to redo the lower two by following a totally different plan altogether. The photographs that I referred to for the lower two thumbnail sketches

are as below. They are from LANGKAWI island ( Malaysia ) and I am definitely planning

to do both these landscapes some day in my style.

Two landscape photographs from Langkawi ( Malaysia )

Creating thumbnail sketches, I feel, has brought about a lot of discipline in my art journey.
I was inspired to do so after seeing many other artists doing the same. My personal
experience also taught me that whenever I went ahead with a large sized artwork
without a preliminary study, the painting either got ruined or did not turn out
satisfactory.