Lately I’ve been painting a lot more from my own photos, especially flawed or odd photos.
Winter Sun
What I I love about the original photo: that super bright blue and yellow in the distant sky! The contrast between vivid and dull.
What I don’t like about original photo: The bright sky is much too small and the cloud is much too large.
What I love about the painting: Emphasized the bright sky and color matched extremely well with Manganese Blue Nova and Naples Yellow Deep. Also, the setting sun element, which I added wholesale, is evocative.
What I don’t love about the painting:
- Gray cloud needed to be darker and cooler.
- More precision in silhouettes would have helped; I put them on too wet.
- I can see an unwanted line above the sun where I tried to blend too late.
Jericho Mountain
On our October foliage trip, I found myself fascinated by this sunset behind a mountain. I snapped the reference photos from the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant in Berlin, New Hampshire.
Like about original photos: Glorious sunset/cloud colors!
Don’t like about original photos: Composition, mainly. I like the full mountain better than the half-mountain, but the full photo is hopelessly tilted. Both photos have too much random stray nonsense (e.g. cars in the parking lot).
Like about the painting: Bright colors; contrast between cool zenith and warm horizon; cloud shapes.
Don’t like about the painting: Mainly the colors look garish when compared with the original. Manganese Blue Nova was not the right choice here – or at least, I could have muted it down way more with complementary colors. Also, I’m incapable of painting straight lines with a rigger, but I knew that about myself.
Gorham
The photo was taken earlier the same evening. The challenge I gave myself for this painting was to keep the sky color muted.
Like about the original photo: Subtle sky colors and glorious cloud shapes.
Don’t like about the original photo: Awkward perspective and dark clutter in foreground. There is a mountain in the background but it’s very distant.
Like about the painting: I did managed not to make the blue too bright by mixing the Holbein Manganese Blue Nova with Daniel Smith Deep Scarlet. I also like that I emphasized the mountain.
Don’t like about the painting: So much! I really feel that I did not do the original photo justice. There should be more interesting cloud variation, more value contrast in the sky. Town Hall is awkward and generally I did not use a delicate enough brush for the smaller shapes.
No Turn on Red
Like about the original photo: It *almost* captures how extremely bright red this maple was!
Don’t like about the original photo: Urban clutter.
Like about the painting: The brighter parts of the red feel right. I also like the sunlit green grass I put on the bottom and the way I nodded to the urban clutter but cleaned it up a bit, emphasizing the funny “No Turn on Red” sign and putting that and the pretty blue library sign on the same post.
Don’t like about the painting: Awkward slanted horizon line. I’m also not satisfied with the dark parts of the red tree. I didn’t get the color dark and muted enough for the right contrast, in my opinion. I used a lot of Indian Red and blues but it came off too brown and weirdly light-valued. I think perhaps using Perylene Maroon would have been better, and/or putting on the shadows in a drier state so they would have had sharper edges and less drying shift.
On the blue topic, I used old reliable Phthalo Blue GS and Ultramarine combinations in the sky and library sign.
Cotton Candy Clouds
This is one of the first times since starting this project that I intentionally took a photo to remind myself to paint later, so I didn’t mind that it wasn’t good. Although I could see the clouds clearly in person, they are very tiny in the photo and the colors aren’t super accurate, so I also took the note that the cloud colors were “grapefruit face, mauve with surprising flashes of cyan in shadows.”
The resulting painting feels more like a quick study to capture the ideas than a finished painting, which it is! But I wanted to bear in mind that I found Phthalo Blue GS very pleasing here.
Drumlin Farm
I used a combination of the photo reference and memory (after all, began painting this only a day or two later) to represent this particular winter hike mood: the clear sky streaked with soft cirrus clouds, yellow-brown grass dotted with leaf litter, and mix of evergreens, sticks, and late red foliage.
This is another utilitarian “paint this later” photo. It does what it set out to do, which is capturing the colors of the scene accurately. I knew I would be able to edit out the clutter, giving the painting a more expansive, sky-heavy look, closer to the appearance of the top of the hill than the position of the photo at the foot of the hill.
Like about the painting: Overall I think the painting has the general mood I was going for! I’m especially happy with the sky which has about the right colors and shapes to convey that crisp, warm-to-cool gradient sky blue with soft clouds. I used mostly Phthalo Blue Green Shade, mixed with Ultramarine in the zenith.
Could be improved about the painting: I’m a bit critical of the size and placement of trees. I made the left tree smaller and the right tree larger than in the photo, but I think it would have been more evocative to keep them the right size and let the sky be bigger. Also, the red tree is overlapping the pine too much, which is true to life but reads a bit oddly. The perspective is wrong on the hillside, and I struggled with how to render the leaf litter. I could als ohave made the colors darker and lower chroma instead of just using lighter washes.
Conclusion
This month, I found myself exploring cyan blue, including Manganese Blue Nova and Phthalo Blue GS (both versions of PB15:3). Manganese Blue Nova uses the pigment of PBGS, but it is an attempt to mimic the hue of original Manganese Blue by keeping the value lighter. You cannot go dark with it. I have generally felt that this makes it less useful than PBGS, but I gave it a chance to prove to me that it was useful to have this lighter color to avoid accidentally going too dark in skies.
Ultimately, I think I confirmed my original feeling. Even when making light skies, I found I was more consistently happy with simply using good ol’ Phthalo Blue GS and simply using diluted washes if I wanted it lighter-value.