Creating a Thumbnail sketch from Leh Ladakh photograph by Manju Panchal

From photograph to thumbnail sketch

Given below is the photograph of the road leading to Ladakh, as taken by my friend Preeti Jhaveri.

Before creating a painting I normally follow the procedure of creating a rough sketch and colouring it.

I do it cause it saves me a lot of trouble later on. It helps because if the thumbnail sketch looks spent time deciding on the colours that I want in background, foreground and the shadows etc 

Using the above photograph I decided on the few changes that I wanted and then I did a rough

sketch of the beautiful landscape and then using Camel artists quality water colours created the 

thumbnail sketch as given below. I once again created a wet road with reflections and I am loving it.

Thumbnail sketch of Road to Ladakh using water colours.

Size 4" X 5.5"

Now if I feel the need to create a bigger painting I just have to refer to my thumbnail sketch rather than referring to the photograph as I have created the work as I wanted it to be. We paint what we see. 

The above water colour painting of thumbnail sketch has been done on ordinary cartridge sheet.

Regarding the colours used in creating the above painting, I suddenly realised that I have used 

just four colours ie ultramarine blue, light red, burnt siena and crimson which makes this a

limited palette painting. A painting where only a very few colours are used.