Using an Artist Viewfinder

A Week at the Beach (c) Mary Hubley

This is a tiny little painting - only 5" x 7". It may be a small painting, but it's quite a big view.

Painting Large Spaces

It's not all that easy to stand there, at the edge of the surf, and consider doing this as a small painting. You're looking at large things - a great blue sky, long beach, and immense ocean. Vastness is intimidating. Many of my art students are too overwhelmed with the expanse of ocean, surf, and beach to try to capture it at all, yet alone doing it on a small canvas. It's just too big.

But it doesn't have to be intimidating; there is one trick that makes this do-able. When a landscape is too big, I use a viewfinder to quickly figure it out.

Using an Artist's Viewfinder

An artist's viewfinder is kind of like using a camera lens; you hold it up to the subject, squint and look through one eye, and move it around until you frame the perfect composition. Instead of taking a snapshot, you paint what you see through the viewfinder.

With this painting, I used my viewfinder to crop out much of the sky and the ocean, making the beach the largest element in the foreground. I could have done the opposite - cropping off much of the beach, leaving a great blue sky and larger body of water. I liked this view better.

Genre: Landscape
Painting Name: A Week at the Beach
Size: 5" x 7"
Media: Oil on Canvasboard


--Mary Hubley