I was recently asked to make three paintings in and around a farm in Perthshire, a fun project for me as it was near where I grew up and the landscape there reminds me of my childhood. Other painters I know have drawn connections between childhoods spent outdoors and the later joy of landscape painting, and I’ve felt something of that rings true for me too.

As with all projects, I did a good bit of scouting for compositional ideas to explore what worked and what didn’t before committing to the larger canvasses. The second and third paintings were to be hung as a pair so I had to find compositions that would be sympathetic to one another.

Here are some compositional ideas that didn’t make the cut.

The big difference between the sketches and the larger pictures is that you get so much more time to think about big ones as they take longer to paint and you end up standing in front of the subjects for so much longer. One of the advantages of working from life this way is that you see the subject change over time, and can adjust your picture when something changes in a way you like. In the third painting for instance I liked the longer shadows of the early morning. That something has worked as a sketch however doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work as a big picture. This last sketch very nearly became one of the final paintings. I tried three different times to do a large version of this and each time it failed. Perhaps the rather slapdash markmaking of a sketch disguises the fact there is just not enough material there to make a really interesting painting. I’m still not entirely sure. There were several other sketches too that I felt failed early on enough to be able to rule out as ideas. On a seperate note, I’m going to start photographing the paintings properly, these iPhone pics just dont cut it.