Painting from a Photo Is Not Cheating
Okay. Last lesson was committing the stroke, not poking at it. Related topic today, and it's one people get weirdly moral about.
Painting from a photo is not cheating.
I'll say it again because somebody always brings up "painting from life" like it's the only honest way to do this. I compose from photos constantly. I'll take fifteen shots of the same canyon wall trying to get one where the light's doing something worth chasing, and then I'll sit at my table weeks later working from the photo, not the place. That's not a lesser painting. The composing is the work. Standing there with wet feet holding a brush doesn't make the decisions for you. You still have to decide what stays and what goes.
So let's talk about how to actually use a photo instead of just copying it, because those are different things.
Step one: pick the photo before you pick the painting
Don't grab the prettiest photo on your phone. Grab the one with the clearest light direction and the clearest separation between foreground, midground, and background. If everything in the photo is the same value, you're going to fight that the whole time. I'd rather work from an ugly photo with good light than a gorgeous photo that's flat.
Print it or pull it up big on a tablet, something you can actually study, not a thumbnail.
Step two: thumbnail it small first
Before you touch the good paper, do a two-inch pencil thumbnail. Just shapes, just three values. This is where you decide what the photo is actually about. Maybe the photo has a barn, a tree line, and a mountain, and you decide the painting is really about the tree line. Fine. Crop the barn out. Move the mountain over. The photo's not sacred. It's reference, not scripture.
I feel like this is the step people skip, and it's the one that separates a photo-copy from an actual composition.
Step three: change at least one thing on purpose
Every time you paint from a photo, change something. Push the horizon up or down. Drop a tree that's cluttering the middle ground. Warm up light that was actually kind of gray and boring in the original. If you're not changing anything, you're tracing, and tracing is a different skill than painting. Nothing wrong with tracing, it's just not what we're doing in this class.
Step four: work your layers off the photo's light, not its detail
This ties back to something I keep saying: layers make a landscape read, not detail. Use the photo to figure out where the light's coming from and where your darkest darks actually sit, then simplify. If the photo has six shades of green in the grass, you probably want two. Let the photo inform the structure, and then get it off your table, mentally, so you're not chasing every leaf.
A quick word on working outside with a photo or a painting on your lap
If you're referencing off a phone or tablet outside, in this county that means bright sun most of the year, which means two problems. One, you can't see the screen. Two, heat.
I learned the heat lesson the hard way, though not with a photo — with a finished painting. I'd left a piece drying on my car dash on a summer afternoon, figured the tape would hold it flat while I ran an errand. Came back and the heat had cooked the tape adhesive right into the paper. Peeled up a strip of sky when I pulled it off. Ruined the sheet.
So now I'm careful about anything taped sitting in direct heat for long, whether it's a painting or reference photos clipped to a board. Dash of a car in July here gets hot enough to warp things you wouldn't expect. If you're working from a printed photo outside, keep it in shade, or you'll be dealing with curled paper and lifted tape same as I did.
A caution on copyright, since we're on the topic
If you're using someone else's photo — pulled off the internet, a friend's Instagram, whatever — that's fine for personal practice, but don't sell that painting or enter it somewhere without knowing whose photo it was and whether you had permission. Your own reference photos, no issue. Somebody else's, just be thoughtful about it.
Try this at home
Take one photo you've been avoiding painting because it feels too ordinary. Thumbnail it small, three values only. Find the one change you'd make — crop something out, shift the horizon, whatever — and paint that version instead of the literal one. That's the whole exercise. The photo gets you the facts. The thumbnail is where you decide what the painting's actually about.
Before next time: bring two photos you'd consider painting from, one that feels safe and one that feels like a stretch. We'll pick one together next lesson and start composing off it for real.