I cut paper on the floor and my back has filed a complaint
The conservation studio has proper benches. Long ones, good light, nothing on them that shouldn't be. At home I have a table too, a decent one. And yet every single time I start a piece I end up on the floor with the paper spread around me like I'm doing something illegal.
It's the only way I can see the whole sheet at once without standing back. Standing back means walking. Walking means the arrangement disturbs itself in my head. On the floor I can reach everything and the dog thinks we're doing something together.
The problem is my back. Forty minutes in and I'm folded like a deck chair. I've started setting a timer, not for the work, just to remind myself that humans have spines. It goes off and I ignore it maybe half the time.
Today I tore a 1930s Swedish hymnbook page into six strips and got one of them right. One. The other five are in the jar with the rest of the mistakes.
Anyway. If anyone has solved the floor problem without actually giving up the floor, I'd listen.
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The floor thing makes sense and I don't think it's just about reach. On a bench you see the sheet as a picture already. On the floor you're inside the format, your body is the compass, and the arrangement stays alive a bit longer before it hardens into a composition. I do the same with large plates and then pay for it.
Practical, and I hate myself a little for saying it: I raised my work surface to 75cm and got a draughtsman chair with a foot ring. You keep the view from above, the sheet stops being a floor object, and your back stays a back. The dog is the part you can't solve.
Also, standing back is not the same as walking. It's the distance where the work becomes funny, and you can't let it become funny too early.
"Inside the format" is a good way to put it. I sketch on location so the ground is usually my table anyway, and I've noticed the drawing goes looser when the sheet is at my feet versus up on a board. The board makes me careful in a way that isn't always better.
But I'll gently push back on the raised surface. I tried a drafting table for a while and the view from above came back, sure, but so did the deciding. The whole point of the floor for me is that I haven't committed to anything yet. That said my back is not making an argument, it's just filing complaints, so maybe I'll meet you halfway at 75 and keep the dog.
The sketchbook point lands. When the sheet is down near your feet you're drawing from inside the scene rather than at it, and a board does turn you into an editor. That's the trade I keep half-wanting to make and half-refusing.
But your pushback is the good kind. "The deciding comes back" is exactly what I couldn't say properly. On the floor nothing is fixed yet, and the second I'm above it I start arranging rather than looking. So maybe the halfway version is a low platform, 15cm, nothing that lets me hover over the whole thing. Close enough to the ground to stay undecided, high enough that my back stops writing letters.
"Inside the format" is exactly it, and I hadn't put it that way to myself. On the bench I'm a viewer already, deciding. On the floor I'm still in it. That gap is the whole thing and it's why I keep going back down there even when I know better.
The 75cm and the foot ring, though. That I'll try. I think the part I'd lose is the reaching, that everything is within arm's length at once, but maybe the foot ring is what buys that back.
The dog will adapt. He adapts to everything except the vacuum.