I’m back to painting some of my own photos! Many of these were intentionally taken as reference photos, to remind me of a scene that I wanted to paint more than to create great art in and of themselves. These are my favorite types of photos to show alongside the painting because it shows how it takes imagination and heavy mental editing to get to a scene from a snapshot.
Crow o’Clock
I used multiple personal photos to reference the sunset here. The crows are from stock photos, and personal observation.
Colors: PBRS, Gold Ochre, Quin Red (PR209)
What inspired me in the 1st photo: The bold colors and the curly low clouds.
What inspired me in the 2nd photo: Hazy distant mountain and low horizon golds.
What I learned from the painting: Sketch ahead, especially bold foreground crows!
What I love in the painting: The colors and the overall feeling.
Gull 1
Colors: Cobalt Blue, MANS, Quin Red (PV19)
What inspired me in the photo: The gull against a light-colored shaft in the dark sky, with hazy land beneath and soft gradient clouds above.
What I learned from the painting:
- There is such a thing a being too chromatic in shadows; I lost the monochrome harmony of the overall scene and implied the bird itself is colorful.
- Need more confidence in painting thin little legs.
What I love in the painting:
- I zoomed way in!
- Interesting lighting.
- I made it my own. The photo I believe is of a glaucous-winged gull, which does not have a dark head, but the darkness of the head shadow made me think of a dark-headed gull such as a Laughing Gull. So when I painted this, I combined it with a stock image of a laughing gull.
See more of my bird paintings in my Bird Life List collection.
Tiny Clouds
Colors: Cobalt Blue, Phthalo Blue GS, Naples Yellow Deep, Quin Coral
What inspired me in the photo: The dotted tiny pink clouds in the sky immediately suggested a watercolor technique: lifting dots of white from a blue sky using a paper towel, then glazing the whole thing in pink (or the reverse, staining pink in the first layer, then lifting a second, wet, blue layer).
Learned from the painting:
- Straight masts are hard.
- Maybe there’s something to be said for using a prefab black (instead of insisting on mixing the black).
- The paper towel and glazing technique came out a bit messy, largely because I kept going over it until it lost definition.
Love in the painting:
- I made sure to make the blue sky layer greener than I wanted, so that glazing it with PR209 would give it the desired violet tone.
- I like the soft gray clouds on an additional wet layer.
- I’m getting better at flying crows!
Pastel Power Lines
Colors: Gold Ochre, Phthalo Blue GS, Cobalt Blue, Quin Red (PR209), white gouache (moon only)
What inspired me in the photo: The soft pastel sky juxtaposed with the intense deep-gold as the sun catches the wooden pole at golden hour. The half-moon adds to the dreamy, vaporwave aesthetic. I painted this scene mostly zoomed in on the middle.
Learned from this painting:
- Straight lines are hard! So are curved lines! Every line on here has weird waves from my hand shaking or from using two or more strokes while I was trying to make confident, straight lines.
- I liked the gouache moon better before I overworked it. “Holes” in the moon to show the color of the sky are better used for the shadows than painting in shadows.
Love in this painting:
- The colors!!! I have tried and failed to get these soft pastel cotton candy sky colors in the past, and it just all came together this time. You don’t need white mixes to get pastels!
- My sky is much more cyan than the photo, but I don’t mind it. I used a soft mix of PBGS and Cobalt Blue.
- The use of PR209 (Quin Coral) as the red allows me to emphasize the warmth of the post (in a mix with Quin Gold) as well as making soft violets in the clouds (in mixes with the blues). It’s “pushy” enough that I could paint it over the blue when wet and it makes space for itself.
The Last Unicorn
Colors: Phthalo Blue RS, New Gamboge, Quin Red (PR209), Indigo, TRO
What inspired me to paint this photo: Here’s an example of a bad reference photo only loosely inspiring a painting. I wanted to paint the colors of the sunset, but the photo I got was just covered in oak leaves. Rather than painting it all as leaves, I decided i needed a focal silhouette shape, so I added a fanciful unicorn.
Learned from the painting:
- I am too impatient to paint the same small shape over and over.
- It’s too easy to turn sections of foliage into a neat, tidy shape. It would be better with irregular clumps.
- Crispness would be more convincing than shades of gray in the silhouettes. Maybe I should have used black gouache instead of mixing my blacks.
Love in the painting:
- I’m getting really good at getting these sunset colors and gradients.
- Not bad for my first horse!
Gull 2
Colors: Ultramarine Blue, Transparent Red Oxide, MANS, Quin Red (PV19)
What inspired me to paint this scene: This is a case where I was already thinking about how to paint the scene when I was looking at it, and I was almost painting the memory more than the photo. The water looked so light in the dark twilight, and the feeling was so peaceful.
Learned from the painting:
- I find this a bit busy and the gull gets lost in the waves. Perhaps the water should have been lighter and the gull darker. In the painting, the wayer looks dark, but in life it felt light.
- It is incredibly hard to paint waves.
- Watch those cross-strokes, you can see where my brush picked up paint from the boat.
- It would have been nice if I could have preserved more light spots in the sky.
Love in the painting:
- I like the way I changed the composition to put the gull at a “rule of thirds” spot and balance with the diagonal boat. I also lightened the boat in value in order to create atmospheric perspective and de-emphasize it.
- There is a feeling of peacefulness that I do think captures the overall mood I was going for.
Galiano Island
I visited family on the lovely Galiano Island and finally got some classic, picturesque, BC scenery! I took lots of photos, but this scene is primarily based on the two pictured. I also added a turkey vulture.
Colors: Quin Gold, Ultramarine Blue, Phthalo Blue GS, MANS, Quin Red (PV19)
What inspired me to paint these photos: I was thinking mainly of the way the sunlight catches Douglas firs at golden hour (witnessed on the island, but didn’t get a photo of), the shapes of the spindly trees and the classic combination of sea/trees/islands/clouds.
Learned from the painting:
- I need more elegant ways of painting evergreens. I did a “dots” method which I think looks awkward. Needs nicer strokes, and to be more uniformly dark or have more value variation.
- Maybe I should think about which elements of the island go together. Turkey vultures were present on higher cliffs, not on low beaches.
- I do think there are specific elements of the gold-lavender color combos in the clouds that I didn’t capture.
Love in the painting:
- I normally try to let the background fully dry before painting the foreground but there is something about the way the island softly dried into the clouds that I like.
- Water reflection turned out pretty good.
Kits Beach Sunset
I actually think this stands on its own better when you don’t see the reference photo, which might be a good sign?
Colors: PBRS, Quin Red (PR209), Azo Yellow, New Gamboge
Why I wanted to paint this scene: Classic sunset! I actually painted this same-day (though not on location).
Learned from the painting:
- Make sure to have enough light when painting; I thought this was A+ in dim light then when I looked at it in full light the next day it was dingier than I remembered.
- Also, don’t forget to clean your paintbrush between colors! I almost ruined the sky with gray transitions but I covered them with clouds.
Love in the painting:
- The colors are different from the photo but I think maybe more accurate to real life! Photos make sunsets look orange, but I experience them as being more yellow and pink in real life.
- PBRS + PR209 made a nice subdued blue sky that let the yellow pop.
- That bold gash of yellow (a mix of Azo Yellow and New Gamboge) really glows. It looked too saturated when I painted it, but it dried the way I wanted.
- Paper towel pickup was successful at getting those random bits of light color in the clouds.
- That tiny sail in the middle is doing a lot of work. I painted it last, after I realized everything in the painting – the clouds, the mountain, the wave shadows – appeared to be pointing at one spot, and it was conspicuously empty. The sail provides a focal point.
Fall Leaves & Clouds
Colors: Quin Red (PR209), New Gamboge, Azo Yellow, PBRS, Cobalt Blue, Mars Brown (PR101), Transparent Red Oxide
Why I wanted to paint this scene: There is a particular way that fall clouds in this area can look at sunset: heavy, violet, bruise-like against the light gold of the horizon. Fall leaves looked really good against this muted backdrop. Unfortunately the camera did not capture this at all. I used the reference photo for the tree shape; my second reference photo does better justice to the clouds but isn’t quite right. I think the painting captures what I was trying to capture better, which is a nice feeling!
Learned from the painting:
- It is easy to make leaves on trees too uniform and evenly spaced. This I think is an issue with the left tree. The right tree is better in this regard.
- It is difficult to make convincing tree shapes with little brush marks. Maybe a more angular brush shape would be more natural for maple leaves. I used round.
- I painted the falling leaves without pre-shaktching and the first one appears to be falling at a very unnatural angle. Adding the second one helped.
Love in the painting:
- The colors of the sky are just perfect for what I was trying to capture: a highly specific midpoint between gray and colorful, with color shifts between blue and warm violet/brown, and a strong contrast with gold in the horizon.
- Color shifts in the fall leaves. The right tree looks almost too neat of a gradient red/orange/yellow/green down to the base, but that is how the tree looked!
- I worried I was overdoing it and painting too many trees and blocking the sky, but I think I painted the right number. The sense of glimpsing a wild sky through gaps in trees is an important part of the feeling I was trying to capture.