Plein Mall

The important thing in middlebrow art these days is that your work has to have been done entirely in "plein air," that is, sitting outside in the environment with your paints, depicting what you see on-site. Well, now that I have the iPad, I can create on-site color sketches anywhere without all that messy paint or intrusive easel. (I can also do that with colored pencils, though it's still somewhat bulky.) And instead of working in some pretty "natural" environment, I took my iPad to the mall. So this is a "painting" done in "plein Mall." You can see I'm still learning to control the medium, since my lines and areas are still sort of irregular. But I've got the color matching pretty well. This is a detail of the rotunda in the newer section of Tysons Corner Mall. What is interesting, if a bit dazzling, is that the bright purple color you see in the round coffers of the ceiling is one of any number of colors that light it up. It switches from purple to red to green to blue to white and so forth. I liked the purple best, so I chose that shade for the image.

Here's an art sketch Weblog by a major professional movie designer, and all his views are done on an iPad.