A Long Walk - Editing Your Photo

"A Long Walk" - 6x6 - Watercolor - March 2016

Sometimes when you feel you've got nothing to paint from your reference photos, you just need to look with a different eye.     I like to write on the back of my reference photos every time I paint from one of them.    I'll put the date and the medium.   I had passed over this photo from my "hometown" group of photos many times.   It had a house on the right and several cars on the left side parked on the street and a concrete curb.   After I picked it up and started sketching in the scene, I was not sure how much I'd put in the painting.  I actually edited out a lot of the original photo.     Looking back the only thing I'd change now is to add a couple more of the rusty trees with light trunks in the back.   This is probably how this street looked years ago before the sprawl of development took over.   There are still spots that have trees and fields.     The funny thing about a place "everyone" loves is that after everyone moves there no one loves it any more.   Now this is a cluttered street.

Looking at a photo and editing out things is a great way to revisit an old reference photo.   Another way to look at them is to cut two pieces of paper to make a mat and keep moving them around different parts of the photo to find new compositions.   Sometimes you can find 3-4 paintings in one reference photo which are very different.