Just the other day, I ran across this really great presentation on how to plan a painting. The presentation, titled, "Planning the Work, Working the Plan," outlines six basic steps on how to plan your next painting. There's color examples given and mini-exercises on how to write out what you're going to do. The presentation, written by Peter Ulrich of The Art League School, assumes you will be working from a photo reference.
Here is a summary of the six steps:
Intro: An overview on choosing photographic reference material
1. Examine why you picked the particular photo as a reference
2. Make one or more planning sketches
3. Scale the photo to size on your watercolor paper
4. Write down your plan of attack
5. Stop and review what you wrote down in Step One
6. Paint your picture.
Definitely worth a look! Note: The presentation is a Microsoft PowerPoint file, so you'll need to have Microsoft Office installed on your machine to view the file.
