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Wonder why it’s so hard to find a good reference photo to paint from? For beginning landscape painters choosing a subject to paint is surprisingly difficult. You can have a phone full of collected photos (which I do) that you thought you wanted to paint, but as you scroll through looking for a subject you dismiss one after the other and feel you have nothing at all to paint! This is apparently a very common problem as I see it mentioned over and over in the artists’ community groups. 

How do I take a photo that will make a good painting?  Or how do you know whether the photo you have taken will be interesting, not too busy, not boring, not too hard to tackle? Why do I keep on taking photos that don’t seem to work when I go back and look at them later?

Experienced artists I have watched in demos often choose what at first seem like very boring photos to paint from. I was baffled by their choices when the photo to me looked like it had no potential at all and then they would transform this boring photo into something engaging and stunning! How did they know? How can I do that?

First, what will generally NOT make a top notch landscape painting.
1. Scenery-type photos of beautiful vistas (too complex with too many unrelated elements and no focus)
2. Calendar scenes of distant views framed by close up branches on the edges (in a painting the branches look out of place unless you can see the tree they are attached to)

I’m not saying these choices will never work but they are not the best subjects for beginning painters. I felt I had a breakthrough of sorts when I followed a few basic rules:

1. The subject should have something of interest in the fore, middle, and background. (Interesting clouds could count as the background, and grasses or color shifts in dirt could count as foreground or in this case clouds and mountains as background, garage as mid ground and snow as foreground).

2. Large shapes of dark and light are more engaging and interesting than many small shapes. (One main tree versus many trees, or a single mass of trees against the sky versus many separate trees against the sky.) See the main blog painting of large shapes.

3. Keep it as simple as possible - more simple than you think you want to paint, boring even. Simple is peaceful  and restful and viewers love peaceful.

4. A path, actual or invented, to lead the viewer into the painting. Could just be a break in the foreground grass or a change in color of the dirt showing a person where to enter. 

5. And the last is that diagonal lines are more energizing than horizontal. So lines of say a path vanishing into the distance, converging with a mountain silhouette and a streak of clouds moving at an angle is more interesting than all of the same on horizontal planes. Notice the diagonal converging lines of the path, line of shrubs on the left, and right,  hillside slope generating movement.

If you follow even some of these guidelines when choosing photos your paintings will improve significantly!I have discovered through a few years of agonizing missteps that it is nearly impossible to produce a good painting from a poor choice of a reference photo! Better to at least give yourself a chance to paint something you like!

And back to the artists using “boring” photos. Turns out they know from experience that their chosen photo does contain good “bones” you might say, and in their mind’s eye they can see how by playing with colors, values, etc. they can turn it into something beautiful and engaging.