Part 3, Project 3, Exercise: Painting from a photograph

Final Choice for printing on A4

Other photographs at the same location

Other photographs at the same location

These photographs were taken  minutes walk from my home, I deliberately chose this location as reading ahead I could see I could revisit it as often as I chose. I took some photographs and brought them home for review. What appealed to me about this particular view is the stripes in the rolling field made by the farmers tractor mower. I felt this would present a good opportunity to work on different shades of green within the same tone.

I am rally trying to apply learning from previous exercises as I progress through this course rather than view the exercises in isolation, so before commencing painting from the photograph I decided to carry out an experimental sketch beforehand in my sketchbook.

Sketch prior to working on "Painting from a photograph"

I having considered the photograph and the composition in light of my practice sketch I then ended up folding away a section of the landscape which I felt would not contribute well to my overall finished painting. I have not "cropped" the photograph uploaded here on my blog as I wanted to document the original photograph as it was taken. I found making notes as I went along in my sketchbook really helped me with the final composition.

I then worked on my painting using the photograph an my sketchbook as reference, here s the completed painting:-

Final Painting - Painting from a photograph

I have tried to take a looser less constrained approach to this painting and overall am quite happy with the outcome. through building layers tonally I have been able to portray the striping of the field without having to "paint in" the lines. As much of the landscape to the right of the trees was not as interesting as the foreground I decided to eliminate this area and allow the trees and the field to dominate. I think the practice of painting a preliminary sketch has definitely allowed me thinking time to create a more considered composition, and I felt a lot more comfortable approaching the final painting. Looking closely at the photograph showed me there was actually a reasonable amount of pink tones in the path, brambles and the shrubbery in the distance, I think including these pink tones in my painting significantly warmed up the colour palette and also perhaps made the painting a more accurate reflection of the landscape.

The colours are more true to the photograph in "real life" than they are on this photograph, which seems a a difficult concept to explain but I do not want to start adjusting the colours in my photographs simply to make them look truer on my learning log/blog!

This study does not look like a study made outdoors, looking back at my other paintings made outdoors I think this is because I have taken my time in painting it, I have allowed the various colour washes to dry between washes, in fact I have used this drying effect deliberately to create definition between the lines in the 

grass and to create the feeling of distance and depth in the trees.

The completed painting does resemble the photograph, in my head this says this is a success, however emotionally I question whether this is actually what I am trying to achieve. My painting with hyacinth30 http://hyacinth30.blogspot.co.uk/ became much more implicit of the hyacinth than representational, and I viewed this more abstract approach as success, rather than creating meticulous reproductions of the hyacinth at each attempt. I think I am approaching a point in this module where I need to decide whether to translate the exercises literally and follow the instructions to the letter, or whether to try to give a more emotional response to the required exercise and tasks. 

The problems with painting from a photograph of a scene which I have "seen" mean that I am not just referring to the photograph for content but also considering the weather conditions, the tone of the light, the temperature and the "essence" of the place, all of which are very difficult to re-capture in a painting. I don't think I necessarily needed any more information to make this picture a success but I think this painting was more about not trying to include everything in the painting rather than trying to include everything on the photograph (which was tempting!).

I think the main difference in approach for this exercise was ensuring I completed a preliminary sketch beforehand, I think this was instrumental in me having a bit more confidence to select a part of the scene rather than feel I had to recreate the entire image.