Here’s a deeper look at some of the paintings I did in November based on my own, personal photos.
Photo to Painting
Photo to Painting: Late October Trees
I feel like I was precipitate in posting Photo to Painting: October Trees, since I ended up painting more trees from photos at the end of October! So here’s another post. School Tree This one’s not exactly a “photo to painting”: I painted the tree from life, through the window. I am including it mainly … Read more
Photo to Painting: October Skies
After painting the aurora this month, I went back into the archive to paint photos from September as well as several cool skies from last winter. Now that I am back in Massachusetts, it feels a lot more emotionally possible to paint my old Massachusetts photos. Suburban Aurora Like many in North America, I was … Read more
Photo to Painting: October Trees
The theme of this photo-to-painting is foliage & autumn leaves! These photos were all taken this very month, intentionally as reference photos.
Photo to Painting: September BC Sunsets
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.
Photo to Painting Archive: Sky of the Day Summer 2022
Lately, I’ve been doing a “photo to painting” post just about each month, showcasing paintings I did recently and the photo inspiration (which may or may not be old or bad photos). Going through my old photos, I found a run of photos from 2022 that were used as inspiration for my “Sky of the Day” photos in summer 2022. While I posted those in various contexts (e.g. my year 2022 retrospective), I’m not sure I ever posted the references.
As always, you are cordially invited to paint any of my photos that you wish. See the curated highlights on my Unsplash.
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.
Photo to Painting: Blue November Edition
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 … Read more
Photo to Painting: Autumn Foliage
I spent much of October painting autumn foliage. Much of it was outdoors/plein air/in person, but sometimes I saw a great tree and took a snap to paint later at home, and I actually did. This is the first month where I did a lot of painting from my own, very recent photos. Let’s see how it went!
Sunset Photos Part 2: More Mauve!
Last month, I began painting some of my old photos, and realized all the ones I wanted to paint were sunsets! I was a little disappointed with my results, largely because I kept insisting on using Ultramarine Blue in the more violet clouds, which kept them very electric-bright when they should have been mauve. So, I decided to paint some more, different sunset photos, with a special effort to keep the mauve clouds muted.