I'm in a slump. I have been going through literally thousands of photos for ideas to work from, but nothing is inspiring me. Its made me realize something that the photos do and do not do for me. When I take photos for art work reference, I am often sketching the scene, and I am smelling the hot coffee or exhaust, hearing the birds chirp or the ocean waves rolling and its the responses of all my senses that contribute to creation and form an idea in my head.When capture something digitally, I can work from those images with very fresh memories of the location. But once those memories fade, the photos are useless to me. So I've realized I need to get out and about more - I've been too much in my house. I've gone sketching more this past week, and that has generated an idea for a new project - more on that later. The other thing I wanted to mention about photography for painting reference is that its different from photography as art or as documenting family vacations, etc. I went to France and Italy over a decade ago and I don't have a single photo I can use as reference. I took them all as a tourist not as an artist interpreting for painting. I look for unusual cropping, light and shadow, layers, energy and movement for painting reference. I see the painting in my head and record it digitally. I literally shoot from the hip sometimes because even if the shot isn't good, it will bring to mind that image that made me click the shutter and then I can paint what is in my head.I suggest to beginners that they don't try to paint from magazine photos or pretty calendar pictures. Those images are already art and the photographer looks for something that won't translate into paintings.Another issue is the alterations the camera lens makes to the images our eyes see. Charles Sovek is a favorite of mine and he has some interesting lessons on his site - one about painting from photos here. Amazon has several pages of books about painting from photos and I have this one very good one, How Photography Can Make You A Better Painter by Michael Weymouth that discusses the technical aspects of HOW TO photograph specifically for painting reference. Scott Burdick also did a video lesson on using Photoshop to enhance pictures for painting. All very good resource materials.
I was just introduced to fellow DPG Jeff Mahorney's art blogs via Facebook yesterday - love his work! In one of his posts he talked about doing some digital color matching using Photoshop. ("Digital Starts") Its an exercise in seeing when you can't actually get out the paints and work from life. I was reminded of another blog I found quite awhile ago and have since lost track of... but it was a small group of digital artists who used a tablet to create digital paintings. I loved the images and was fascinated by the art and the process. I even looked into buying a tablet and using it to sketch! As an example for now, I found a similar artist who looks like he has since moved on from his "Thousand Sketches" - Walter Logeman - but he has some interesting cafe scene sketches. Its no secret I work from photos regularly and sometimes I use Photoshop to adjust lighting and color, to crop and edit and to add and rearrange, but I haven't used it to paint.So today, while I sat in the infusion clinic with my husband, I played with painting digitally. I used a museum photo and reduced it to a line drawing of sorts using Photoshop's photocopy filter and then I set to work, matching the colors I saw in the original photo and also just being loose and massing things. It was a lot of fun. I used the regular paintbrush but should have looked into using a different style that maybe wouldn't have had such hard edges. Its a great exercise for seeing color. I find that the more I look at photos on the computer, the more color I see. A printed photo can generally lose a lot of subtleties, as it averages the lights and darks, but I find that on my monitor, perhaps because it is bright and illuminating, I see a very wide variety of color. I don't paint in probably near as much as I see... perhaps I need to start! At the end of this exercise I began to pop in some of those colors, but I also wanted them to be small and not disrupt the color harmonies I had working in the overall painting.
I am working on a larger city scene - or 2 or 3 - but specifically trying to fix my overhead umbrellas view which I still believe in. I was surfing last night to find some overhead crosswalk images in the city. I think that dimension will much improve my scene, but I didn't have the right photo. Anyway, I have nothing to post, but I found some amazing photos on Flikr, which led me to this photographer, John Fraissinet.
Now, as a note, this was just research to see how the crosswalks in NYC are painted. I only use my own photos to paint from. First, I have to have the connection to scene. Obviously there is something that sparked my interest in the first place and I have a mental image of the painting to be as a result. I have ownership in more way than one. Second, I look for different qualities for painting purposes. Generally, my photos would not make good art in and of themselves.
As an example, here is one of my photos which inspired a recent painting:
I found this interesting article not long ago (Fogonazos.blogsot.com) on the masters use of photography. Generally, the assumption is that the early impressionists relied only on observation and life drawing to paint from, but there is evidence that they were also excited about the prospects that photography had to impact their craft.
I obviously paint from photos and sometimes I feel like I must hide that fact in an age when plein air and painting from life seem to dominate the representational art scene nowadays. But, as a reminder for all those who might also turn to photos to help them create art, photos are a starting place only. As we all know they tend to mass the darks and lights and lose a lot of interesting color and dimension. I continue to study the human figure from life. I do a lot of sketching in cafes. I rely on my memory of the scene and my education to take the flat photo to an impressionistic scene full of life and movement. I hope so anyway!
