Turning a Photo into a Painting: From Dark to Definition

Many artists don't approve of painting from a photo.  I do it for landscapes because it's often hard to find a comfortable shady spot to sit and paint ... or, if I do find one, then the scene in front of me isn't right ... or, even with a hat, the sun can get too hot ... or ants start crawling up my legs ... or it starts to rain.  So I often take photos and turn them into paintings in my studio rather than sit outside and paint plein air.  (However, I always do still lifes and flower arrangements from life.)  But now I thought it would be fun to show some Befores and Afters:  the photos I took and the paintings I then made from those photos.

What is important to keep in mind is that I don't follow the photo precisely.  I use it as a reminder:  composition ... what I felt about the scene when I first saw it ... and color, even if it's very dark as these photos are.  Take the immediate picture below.  I took it at sunrise in the Ladakh region of India, the mist not yet burned off, the Indus River only just evident as the sky lightened.  To my eye, the glories of the rising sun (which I could not yet see), obliterated the far scene but turned the nearer one rosy.  And a lovely viridian or even emerald green in the very left center indicated distant mountains.  So, I extrapolated a bit and put that color into the sky as well.  Also, though the photo reveals only the barest hint of sunlight on the middle-ground mountains, I remembered the scene as being lighter and so painted it that way.

The photo

1.  The oil painting.  (The symbol on the bottom middle is the Tibetan for "Om.")

Here is a similar shot taken from Pokhara, Nepal, when the night mists were giving way to the build-up of the morning's clouds that soon hid the mountains.  The sunrise here is evident on the high peaks.  As for the large cluster of bamboo on the lower right, it seemed too unidentifiable for the space it took up, so I left it out.  Nor did I like the left-hand tree "invading" the mists.

The photo

2.  The oil painting

Below is a Vermont scene that really only comes alive once it's painted.

A storm in May

This time I made two paintings--an oil and a watercolor:

3.  The oil painting

4.  The watercolor

Next is a photo I took on a walk early one summer morning when everything was enveloped in fog.  I obviously saw something that the camera muffled but that I was able to translate to the painting.

The photo

5.  The oil painting

Below is a winter scene just a little farther down the road from the one above.  I enjoyed enhancing the sky's lemon color.

The photo

6.  The oil painting

And a different view from the same place:

The photo

7.  The oil painting

Finally, here's another picture from the same area.  The photo is not quite as dark as it appears here.  I had fun finding a greenish color in the grey clouds and mirroring that in the middle tree.

The photo

8.  The oil painting

The paintings:
1.  Where the Indus Meets the Morning
2.  The Himalayas From Pokhara
3.  May Storm
4.  May Storm, Watercolor
5.  Foggy Morning
6.  Winter Light
7.  Winter Along Kipling Road, Oil
8.  A Random Afternoon

Another time I'll do a similar series with a different emphasis.