From snapshot to painting. How does that work? 

Whenever I travel, whether it’s to teach or I’m on holidays, I take a lot of photos! Truth be told, most of what I take are snapshots rather than carefully composed photographs. They especially come under this category when I’m photographing from a moving vehicle. The landscape is whizzing by and I take a quick snapshot of anything that catches my eye. With this method, I capture all sorts of things, much of which is discardable. I always try to weed later that day but I admit, I’m not always successful – baaa – which explains the thousands and thousands of photos filling up my phone!

Often students will look at a snapshot I’ve chosen to work from and wonder what it is I’m going to paint as there’s nothing obviously “paintable” in it. Look harder, I always say, and then show them what I’m seeing. 

We’ve just started this year’s annual 31Pastelsin31Days Challenge in the HowToPastel Facebook group (and also in IGNITE!) and I thought my Day 1 painting would perfectly illustrate this idea of snapshot to painting.

First, let’s look at the snapshot I chose to work from. I was staying with friends after my Tasmania Art Retreat earlier this year. We were out exploring the countryside and as always, I was snapping away. (I love being a passenger so I can concentrate on the scenery rather than the road.) So why did I snap this one? That grouping of trees in the distance caught my eye. 

So what pulled me to paint from this snapshot?

Well, I still love the pattern of those large trees against the sky! I also like that there’s a building (house) which adds human interest. There’s also something appealing about the colours.

It’s an overcast day so there aren’t any of the strong lights and darks we see when the sun’s shining. Instead, an even cool light illuminates everything. Whenever a day is overcast, one of the best things to do is to look for patterns. Look for the design big shapes make especially those created by value (dark and light) contrast. That’s what I am seeing in this snapshot. There’s a light and dark contrast that’s created by the dark shapes of the trees against the light sky.  

I don’t need everything else in the photo to say something about those gorgeous trees so the first thing I did was to crop the photo.

Now I can see more clearly what I want to paint. (I do love those crows in the field but that’s for another day… In fact, as I look more deeply, I can see a number of paintings that could be inspired by the reference photo!)

From there, I created a thumbnail. I looked to simplify the whole scene into three main values of light, middle, and dark. The trees are dark, and the sky and part of the foreground are light. And then what did I do with the rest? Much of it fell naturally into the middle value but I decided to “push” the closer background hill into the dark value.  I also moved one of those bushes to add a dark to the bottom left to bring the eye into the foreground.

Once I was happy with the design of the thumbnail, I selected paper (UART 600) and drew up the bare bones with vine charcoal. 

In pastel, I added the first layer in darks, middles, and lights, effectively blowing up my thumbnail of three values into colour shapes. I chose yellow for the light areas because I wanted warmth under the cool grey sky. And it also worked well for the foreground. Blue was chosen for the middle and dark areas because the overall temperature of the scene was cool but then I could work up some warmth over those blues.

From there I built up the piece in layers of soft pastel.

Here are the Unison Colour pastels I used, lined up from dark down to light. (They are all from the set I developed for the brand)

And here’s the final piece.

And there you have it! Snapshot to painting.

Do you have snapshots you want to paint? Or do you have snapshots that dishearten you because of their blandness? Try to recall why you took the photo – what called out to you? And then look deeply to see if you can “re-see” what initially captured your attention, even if the photo itself is disappointing. There is something there if you look hard enough!

Let me know if this was helpful. Have you been inspired to dig out those travel photos? Do you have questions? Let me know by leaving a comment.

Until next time!

~ Gail