A one-half-inch brush stroke on an 8×10″ canvas can cover a section of the study that may require ten brushstrokes to complete on the larger painting, altering the character of that simple mark made outdoors. … no matter how much I tell myself to hurry up and paint with abandon in the studio, in the back of my mind I know that I have all day (or several days) to complete the painting. As a result, those “happy accidents” that occur under plein air time constraints don’t happen as often in the studio.
Kathleen Dunphy, “Step Inside: Effectively Using Plein Air Studies for Studio Paintings“, 30 June 2013
Another aspect of ‘happy accidents’ is not neatening them out of existence, which is more likely to happen when you’ve lots of time to rework a painting.
