I watched an interesting YouTube demonstration by Al Klein on the American Art School Live Channel about a little tool/technique he uses for plein air sketching. He creates what he calls “littles”. These are small colour studies/composition sketches/almost tonal studies. He creates them in his sketchbook and uses a small viewfinder frame that he made to be the exact ratio of his potential larger work later.
His beautifully simple next step is to place the viewfinder on a blank sketchbook page and use the cutout area as a template and trace out the frame shape onto the page. Thus eliminating any virtual scaling in your brain when transferring your sketch to a larger studio work. It also helps firmly position the main shapes you observe into the correct position within the composition.
I don’t necessarily agree with all his terminology and
explanation, for example, colour temperature is independent of tone. I prefer to limit the term tone to describe the difference between light and darkness. what I did like is the
idea of a small sketch in the field that looks at seeing and defining those
shapes of colour and tone. So I had to make up a couple of viewfinder frames
that would suit any A5 sketchbook. I like
working initially in an A5 sketchbook on site with some basic tools, a small portable colour palette and a pencil. I have made up a variety of such kits based on cheaper
A5 visual diaries/sketchbooks to do my little experiments in the field. I’ve
also started using them pretty exclusively for my tonal studies in the style of
Andy Evanson, these are just monochrome and all about understanding where to
put the initial washers and how to join the various toned shapes. They definitely are not colour studies.
I happen to have some internal offcuts of Mat from frames and set about cutting my viewfinder frames. I’m not using sheet and half sheet sizes for my watercolours much anymore I tend to work in sizes A3, A4 and A5. So decided to try out some viewfinder cutouts based on smaller A-size ratios. I quickly dismissed the A6 size hole as it was too large, my arm wasn’t long enough. Basically, when you hold it in front of your eye it takes in too much of the view to be useful in terms of refining a decent composition. So I ended up cutting 2 frames, one with an A7 size hole and one with an A8 size hole. The A7 size is probably my favourite and works very well at roughly arm's length, you can swing it around and see the various compositions very quickly. The A7 viewfinder seems incredibly small but it’s very useful for zooming in and out, moving it closer or further from your eye and can make an outline for a very neat little colour study in your sketchbook.
The issue of finding the best framing is not just limited to plein-air artwork, it also applies to photography. The vast majority of folk still just lift the camera to their eye roughly centred on the subject they are photographing and press the shutter. A small amount of time spent changing the view (frame) can have remarkable results. Changing a ho-hum composition into something striking. This is really simple with a modern digital camera if they have a suitable LCD screen on the back to preview your test photograph and is really straightforward on any modern smartphone with a camera. Remember to try the zoom feature to get closer or a broader view. If you don’t have a zoom lens you can always zoom with your feet.