Monthly Archives: February 2013

haystacks

wrestling-scan183

Painted from a photo in watercolour, the colours in this haystack scene look a bit cool for a late afternoon in autumn, but that’s the trouble with working from a photo where all sorts of in-camera corrections have already been done.

Or maybe the light was that cool and neutral. Perhaps the reality we’re trying to paint needs a tweak to be believable, or perhaps we need to wait for the scene to change before we decide to paint.

 

master copy

sketches-scan1881 sketches-scan1871 sketches-scan1861

Copying pictures from an old copy of The Picture History of Painting that contains a number of rather heavily printed mono reproductions, which make practice pencil sketches that much easier as the image is already broken down into values.

It’s worth doing these copies just to feel something of the flow and graceful line that the masters managed to put on the canvas.