Photo to Painting: December Late Foliage & Winter Sunsets

With my US National Parks project done, in December, I found myself turning to my photo archive more and more for inspiration. Here’s the photo references for my recent paintings.

Evening Star

This was taken on one of those evenings when the sunset is so gorgeous that I can’t help but snap, snap, snap. Even though the photos are never as awe-inspiring as the experience, and sunset photos are so common that it hardly seems worth it to share them. That’s where painting comes in!

What I love about the painting:

• The use of small, rigger strokes makes the tree look more delicate than my tree usually are.
• The colors are vibrant.
• The very dark, abrupt gradient at the top of the sky is really helpful for making it look ‘evening’-y, even with lighter parts of the sky present.
• I added an ‘evening star’ which, though it does not appear in the original, I think is evocative of a certain type of evening sky.

What I can learn:

• Although I wouldn’t expect myself to match the original tree beat-for-beat, I think the general sense of its being in two big sections could have been rendered.
• The colors are too bright, which I of course kind of like (being a Bright Color Person), but some subtlety could have been more realistic. For example, instead of Hansa Yellow Deep, I could have used Naples Yellow Deep or MANS in the yellow part of the sky. I also could have made the pinks cooler. The photo makes them look orangey (very similar to Quin Coral), but in real life they were pinker.

Somerville Community Path

I took this photo as a memory-reminder of how bright the yellow leaves looked in the overcast light, a rarity this late into fall/winter. I also wanted a photo reference for leaves on the ground, which I’ve been struggling to paint effectively.

What I love about the painting:

• The yellow leaves sure are bright.
• The leaves on the ground are an improvement over previous efforts. They have definitely areas of darker and lighter while also appearing like a chaotic mix of light browns.
• The path looks wet.
• The most distant trees recede into a soft blur, which I think was more effective than attempting to make smaller and smaller branches.
• It’s recognizably the Somerville Community Path, thanks to the distinctive lightposts.

What I can learn:

• Maybe the foreground tree is TOO bright?
• I smeared the guy. Whoops!
• Bit of a perspective error on the path.
• The branches and distinct lightposts look thick and ham-handed; I needed to use a more delicate brush.
• Using white gouache in the fallen leaves helped to recover some lights I lost, but also made the whole thing kind of a chalky mess.

Oak Leaves

The photo, again taken without much regard for photographic excellence, is a close-up that I took specifically to remember the interesting blend of colors on the oak leaves.

I don’t think I really fully captured it, though the use of Quin Red is similar (perhaps a bit too scarlet?) I also could have used more sharp detail in the painting.

Streaky Clouds

Here’s one where I think the photo is much better than the painting. Granted, this is a high difficulty painting situation: a light-colored foreground on top of a smooth gradient background!

What I love about the photo: Captures a weird cloud situation! Colors are great. Classic “rule of threes” composition with the bushes.

What I don’t like about the photo: The twigs on the left are kind of distracting. Ditto the distant radio tower (though I also kind of like it).

What I love about the painting: The background gradient and the shrubs are pretty good. I used black gouache for the shrubs, so the flat black silhouettes were a lot easier to do than in some of my recent experiments with Payne’s Gray.

What I don’t like about the painting: Ugh, the clouds. After I painted the background in watercolor, I did a second layer for the clouds using a mix of white gouache and watercolor. I don’t feel that this was successful. At all. Maybe the paint was not the right consistency, but I tried a lot of consistencies (from drybrush to very wet) and all of them had problems. Maybe I should have done it wet-on-wet, but this is always dicey in gouache. They’re also the wrong color; a warmer, golden pink might have looked nicer.

A Bunch of Sunsets

I took a bunch of photos of this sunset but none of them captured the colors that I saw in real life. I’d say the first one was the closest but the colors were more subtle.

I ended up making several paintings, too, all using all of the references (instead of one-to-one.)

The sky colors of the first one are closest to my memory of the actual sunset. But I truly messed up the tree. The tree in the second painting looks closest to what I wanted (like the small tree in the middle of reference photo 3.) Only the third painting attempts the textured clouds.

Industrial Sunset

What I love about the photo: The soft violet-to-gold sunset with the streaky coral and gray clouds, industrial silhouettes contrasted with a soft sky, a tiny sliver of moon.

What I don’t like about the original photo: It’s zoomed in so it’s kind of blurry, it’s taken from an awkward POV so the straight lines don’t look straight, and there’s some visual clutter in the foreground. The moon is too small and hardly noticeable.

What I like about the painting:

• The silhouettes, made from black gouache, are crisp and black; none of the splotchiness that I was getting from Payne’s Gray.
• The main gradient is smooth, and the color of the yellow part is nearly spot-on.
• The cloud is nice and soft (it’s pinker than in the photo, but that’s true of real life).
• The moon is the size and prominence that I wanted.

What I don’t like about the painting:

• Although I made an effort to keep the violet of the upper sky more grayish than I usually do, it’s still not gray enough!
• The moon, made from gouache, has some blurring that I don’t like; I kind of wish I had masked it.

Soft Sunset

What I like about the photo: Colors! Cotton candy clouds.

What I don’t like about the photo: Kind of boring other than the sky. Typical of this location, there’s an intrusive perspective-slanted baseball light.

What I like about the painting: Coral cloud colors. Blue-to-yellow gradient.

What I don’t like about the painting: Blues too saturated like usual. I didn’t get the soft cotton candy cloud thing.

Summer Sunset

This is actually a summer sunset from the archives! This is another one where I took a couple of runs at the painting.

What I like about the photo:

• I find the clouds and colors incredibly cool and magical-looking. I think more could be done with this.
• The brightness of the coral-orange underclouds!
• Specific undercloud shapes.
• Gold through the tree silhouettes.

What I don’t like about the photo: Some visual clutter especially at the bottom.

For the first painting, I like the silhouettes in foreground (with gouache again) and the addition to sparrow silhouettes. However, I once again made the blue in the sky too bright.

In the second photo, I managed to keep it more muted, but it went too dark. The muted/bright contrast is better, though, and the cloud shapes are good. However, in the silhouette, the power lines aren’t as delicate or straight as I wanted.

Winter Sunset

Here’s a winter photo from my archives, since I wanted to paint snow and it’s been way too warm lately.

What I like about the photo:

• Pink underclouds
• Shadowed snow
• Delicate trees

What I don’t like about the photo:

• Ugly bleachers
• Blurry clouds

What I like about the painting:

• Dark-to-light gradient in sky
• Cloud shapes

What I don’t like about the painting:

• Again, the colors aren’t right… blues are too blue, and I wish I’d made the oranges pinker since the photo tends to make them too orange.
• Underclouds are muddied.

Winter at Walden Pond

What I like about the photo: Muted colors, evokes a sense of place.

What I don’t like about the photo: Complicated, lots of branches.

What I like about the painting: Wintry color scheme; easy to parse.

What I don’t like about the photo: I think I simplified it too much, the pines need more branches.

Winter Sunset Tree

What I like about the photo: Sunset colors, complex tree shape.

What I don’t like about the photo: Very dark background houses and cars on bottom half.

What I like about the painting:

• Sunset colors; very like the original. A bit more saturated in the blues, but I don’t mind in this instance. They still read as soft.
• Pale yellow-yet-slightly-bluish sky color made from a background layer of washy Naples Yellow Deep glazed by a very light wash of Cobalt Turquoise.
• Tree silhouette is interesting. I’m glad I shifted between a thicker brush for the trunk and a thin rigger for the smaller branches. I used a mix of Payne’s Gray and black gouache for the silhouette color to give it body but make it read as smooth gray in dilute.
• Eliminated most of the background entirely.

What I could have done better: I think the overall shape of the tree isn’t captured and could have been better done with more planning/undersketching.

Conclusion

Some things I’ve been doing lately that have worked:

• Using black gouache for foreground silhouettes.
• Using a #2 rigger brush for delicate tree branches and power lines.
• Smooth sunset gradients.
• Deviating from the source photo to fix problems, edit the composition, add evocative details, etc.

Some things I’d like to explore doing differently:

• Masking small crisp bits of white (such as the moon) instead of using white gouache.
• Listening to the voice in my head that tells me not to continue when the paper’s wet and I need to move onto a Wet On Dry layer. Sometimes I find it hard to resist 🙂
• Keeping those colors more muted!