Last week in my 3 classes I was trying to teach students to focus on how to use a photo reference to paint from and not become a copy machine. Many beginner students tend to feel that by copying exactly what is in a photo they will come up with a good painting. Yes they will probably get a nice painting that looks like a photo but if the photo they used
isn't a good photo then you probably will not be creating a good painting.
Photograph reference is exactly what the word says, reference. You use the photo as a reference to help you remember what the scene was without having to be in front of the exact scene. You want to use the photo to help you create a painting and not just to copy it and make it look just like the photo. As a painter I want my work to stand out as a painting and not as a large
photograph.
I believe every artist strives to achieve their own style and some like their work to look like a photo and others like myself am looking for a more painterly style. If you want your paintings to look like a great photo then you also will have to become a great photographer. I choose to try and make my paintings better then the photos that I take. I am not a professional photographer so my photos are only used for reference to help me make my painting look
good in the medium I am using. My main medium is watercolor and I want my paintings to have that feel that only watercolor can give you. I am also experimenting with fluid acrylics and heavy bodied acrylics and even with acrylics I want my paintings to have that painterly look. I am not saying that copying a photo is wrong, as a teacher I try and teach my students to understand all that goes into creating a work of art and just having my students copy exactly what is in a photo isn't
teaching a student to create but making them a copy machine.
I have a great example of what I mean about using the photo as reference to create a watercolor painting. One of my students Dan Billings, last week in class painted the watercolor shown below. My lesson was to work the painting totally wet-into-wet on Plexiglass and try to get the flowers to not be hard edged all the way around the flower, like the photo was. I also wanted them to not use just one color for
the leafy background like the photo shows. This for many students is hard to do because they feel they have to copy not only the image of the photo but also the color, I try and steer them away from this by making the photo reference black and white.
Dan's painting turned out beautiful and I told him he got exactly what I was talking about, to use the photo as a reference to paint a creative interpretation of the photo. Dan's painting turned out so good I asked him if I could use it in
this newsletter, because it is exactly what I try and teach students to do with their photos. Great job Dan, this is a winning painting!
The 2 top paintings are bigger so you can see them more easily, then I placed them side-by-side so you can see how wonderful a job Dan did with his interpretation of his photo.
Dan also knew to crop into the photo to make it a better composition, which will have to be explained in another newsletter that will
have to be on composition.
