Boardwalk Days part 3

Had a lot of art related things keeping me busy the past few weeks. There were the two print workshops (well, one ended up being cancelled, but I still had to prepare for it, and the process of cancellation was an effort itself), printing season for my college classes, and preparing and photographing work to be submitted to some spring shows. This morning I e-mailed in my entry for the annual members show at PCNJ.

But that's all taken care of, so now it's back to making new art. The April critique got pushed back a week, so I may as well take advantage of the time to make something to show. The boardwalk daytime/Asbury scene is still at the top of my production list, so I'm picking up with that one again. I want to explore that view shown above, but there is one problem. The ratio of the heights of the two buildings at either end to the width of the scene is about 1 : 3. The ratio of my standard format for these Floating World prints is more like 1 : 1.3. Part of the reason that all the boardwalk prints to this point have completely made up locations is that I'm often combining aspects of multiple locations. Part of that is because real locations don't always provide the ideal compositions.

In recent days I did sketchbook drawings of many individual elements of the scene, based on my photos from a few weeks ago. Today was my first attempt to put it all together. Brought the sketchbook and a large sheet of paper to the Studio. Below is the result of today's drawing.

This is just a very early sketch, and I plan to fix up the details a bit more before the crit. And I'll need to go to the site again at least one more time to see the perspective again. But this gives an idea of how I might adapt the location to the format. I had to considerably shorten the space between the buildings, but the foreground space gives plenty of space for pedestrians (the benches in the lower right make up for ones lost by the boardwalk railing), and what remains should still read as Asbury for anyone who knows the place.