PAINTING FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
March 22, 2010
Good morning! As I sit here writing, the sun shines brightly on 12 inches of snow that fell yesterday. This is springtime in the Rockies! Temperatures are expected to rise into the 60 F range today and this replenishing moisture will quickly soak into our dry ground. What a marvelous planet we live on.
Early Start 12 x 24 Oil
This is the painting I began as a demonstration at my March Studio Walk. My memory of this day is completely different from my photos and so I demonstrated how an artist must use memory to correctly portray a landscape. In this painting, instead of placing the darks in first, I needed to capture the correct colors of the sunlit hillside and then begin the sequence of darks. This way I would be keying the painting to the lightest light color.
At my March Studio Walk (and thanks to those of you who came and asked good questions) certain subjects came up over and over. So many folk seem mystified by the knowledge and techniques employed by artists to create a three dimensional scene on a two dimensional surface.
First, let me admit that I am still ‘practicing’ my craft; I am not an expert and I make lots of mistakes. I love to teach and especially to approach the art of painting from some scientific knowledge base. I’m not a scientist either and probably have enough science to be dangerous. But I am a careful observer and analyze a subject with my science hat on then switch to my artist hat as I begin a painting. My demonstration painting triggered the following question.
Question: “The colors in the photograph seem totally different from the colors in your painting.”
Answer: Absolutely! And this is one reason artists plein air paint. If we consider plein air paintings as studies and practice at capturing true color and value this way, bring these studies back to the studio as reference for other paintings, then all our work will seem more real and less photographic in color and value.
Let me explain a little about value. If you take a photograph and on your computer change it into black and white – you will have a value study. Depending on the photograph you will have various shades of grey – from black to white. Remember, the camera has some difficulty recording values especially where there are only subtle differences. Now if you add this difficulty to a camera’s color recording difficulty, you can see the problems multiplying.
So the artist has to use memory – after all you took the photo, so you need to remember what it was you saw to stimulate taking a photograph! This is hard work, and over time, with practice, one can get quite good at this. Memory is terribly important for the artist!
Dusting of New Snow 12 x 24 Oil
This painting, though not yet finished, was a perfect example for two of the questions I received at the Studio Walk from onlookers. I did a plein air sketch of approximately this scene in October where I carefully recorded the colors. When I began this painting I used my sketch as a reference. I used 3 or 4 photos for layout and some details and shared all of these with the guests, all of whom were amazed at the difference between the color of my painted water and background hills to the photos. It was a good lesson.
Question: “Why does a photograph look so flat and your paintings look so three dimensional?”
Answer: Good question and thanks for the compliment! There are a number of factors at play here. I use a good quality camera, but I use point and shoot for convenience. Consequently, many of my photos are over or under exposed which is no problem for me as an artist. A camera really cannot record subtle differences or modulations in color. In fact, the camera does a good job of recording information, but not color and it’s not good at recording values either. So these are the first adjustment an artists makes when painting from a photograph.
Then there is the science….The artist needs to know some rules and understand options. I don’t want to bore you so I will make this pretty simple. First, things in the distance are less defined, for obvious reasons, plus you have to look through atmosphere made up gasses, water particles, pollution and dust etc. All this stuff also keeps us from seeing things clearly in the distance and can shift the colors too. The colors we can see drop out as distance increases. The first color to disappear is yellow, next is red and finally blue leaving only pale grey. That’s why mountains look either pale blue grey or maybe pale lavender grey in the distance and trees that are green up close, become reddish blue grey to blue grey in the distance. A camera seldom gathers this subtle information and so we, the artist, must put it in correctly. This is called atmospheric perspective or aerial perspective. Some of what I described above represents value shifts (thus the grey addition to each color). There is a lot more going on, but for simplicity, I will leave it at that.
Next we look at the options an artist has in the overall values for the painting. The artist must choose how he/she wants to “key in” these values. We can choose to paint from pure black to pure white (high key); we can lower the key severely and choose values from light grey to nearly white and anything in between. Imagine the ranges of value we can apply to our painting! As an artist, you must choose and sometimes this is difficult, but this choice helps make the painting appear three dimensional. It also helps in developing a good composition and maintaining harmony in the painting.
Blue River Access 11 x 14 Oil
In this painting, I chose to paint only a few of the dead (red) pine trees – it is such a tragedy that Colorado suffers from such devastation. I also chose to change the position of some of the rocks, remove awkward fallen trees and add some cloud interest in the sky. And of course, I adjusted the colors and lowered the value key. Sorry, but this photograph of the painting shows nearly black areas, but there is nothing that dark in this painting.
Enough lessons for today, time to return to the studio and practice, practice, practice.
Thanks again to my faithful readers for allowing me this dialog. Please sign up for my Email Newsletter.
Ciao!
Ginger
