One of the issues I've noticed is that, for the most part, artists don't know how to photograph their artwork. Taking good quality shots of your art is important when you post them online and even more important if you are entering shots of your art for a juried art show. I was trained as a professional photographer and two-dimensional shooting was part of our training. I'll give you two approaches to shooting your art. First, the low-tech way and then the "proper" way.
Low Tech Approach To shoot your art "low tech", you need a diffuse light source and the best one around is the sun. When the sky is overcast, but still relatively bright, it's the best time to photograph your art. The following steps are taken outside in the diffuse light.
The Proper Way This is the "proper" way to shot a 2-dimensional object such as a painting. Most painters don't have the time or equipment to do it properly, however, this is the way it's done in a studio.
Cheers, Keith
6 Comments
After working with new plein air painters over the past couple of years I've found the following tips to be helpful. Bringing order out of chaos Painting out of doors can be overwhelming. There is just too much "stuff" in front of you to make a good painting. Your first job is to simplify by eliminating all extraneous details and items.
This is a shot of a typical scene. This is a crop of the same scene focusing on a focal point. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the scene. I decided I wanted the mountain to show up in the scene so i moved it right. I also wanted more of the tower to show, so I shortened it. This is the final plein air painting. Keith here today. I'm writing this from the deck of the luxury cottage we rented to run our Muskoka Art Retreat. The students have finished their three days and have gone home with their new paintings. I'm looking over the small sketches I did over the past few days and am thinking about large canvases. Once in a while one of our small works simply calls out to be enlarged. When it does, we take off our plein air hats and move into the studio, pull out a big surface and give it a go. I've done quite a few big versions of smaller works and have come up with a few "rules" to guide me:
11 x 14 to 24 x 36 As you can see, I kicked up the colour, eliminated objects, added more power to the sky and tried to recreate the feeling I had looking at this slice of the Canadian landscape. In the following pair, I wanted to take my already somewhat loose painting and take it to an almost abstract vision. 12 x 16 to 30 x 40 The next two paintings are by Helen. She felt she cropped the original scene too tightly and lost some of the drama of the path in the woods, so from memory and her original painting, she "backed up" and created a deeper version with more vivid colours. She tells me it's a work in progress. 12 x 16 to 30 x 40 I don't always explore new ground with a painting. In the following case, a number of people asked me to paint a larger version of the original sketch, which I did, without trying for anything new. It was accepted into the Quest Spring Juried show and subsequently sold. Similar, but different. 12 x 16 to 16 x 20 Just for fun, I also painted a scaled down version. 12 x 16 to 8 x 10 I hope these "rules" help you in your next enlargement project. Have you enlarged any of your smaller paintings? Do you have any insights you can share?
Keith Our first plein air outing
I didn’t even know what painting "plein air" meant when we joined our first plein air class back in 2008. “En plein air”, painting in the open air. It sounds simple enough, however, it’s all very well to happily paint away in the comfort and security of our studio. It’s another thing to paint out of doors, where other people might be watching us. Talk about nerve wracking. So off we went to paint a semi-urban scene in the nearby village of Unionville. Even setting up we had spectators. “What are you doing?” Are you artists?” “See the nice man painting.” That’s all before I’ve put down the first brush stroke. Despite all this attention, I got set up and began to size up my composition. I’d always painted from my own photographs before, and I’m a pretty good photographer. I know how to crop and make a ho-hum scene something worthwhile to look at. So I was surprised at how foreign the scene in front of me felt. The objects, shapes, lines and colours all rioted in from of me. What to put down first? What was my focal point, where were the shapes a good painting depends upon? I was totally lost. After 60 minutes of chasing shapes and values around my board, I realized that I was getting nowhere. I had a representation of the scene in front of me, but not a painting. Not a piece of art, or even the beginnings of one. What to do? Bring out another board and begin again. Discipline. Paining is not simply representing the space in front of you. Look for the design within the mass in front of you. Squint at the scene to reduce it to the major shapes. Capture those shapes. What are generally the darkest bits, where are the lightest bits? Fill those in. Do it quickly because the sun is moving and the shadows changing. After a couple of hours of trying to simplify and capture the essence of the scene, I was finished. Much better than my original effort. However, something was still missing. Time to pack up, get back to the studio and discuss our day’s work with each other. Perhaps then we’d figure out where the painting fell short. ================ My Ah Ha Moment When I looked over the work I did on my first plein air painting day, I was both troubled and excited. Troubled because I knew the work was falling short in some way. Excited because it was still more powerful than the work I’d been doing in the studio. Helen and I looked over our work and worried the pieces like a pair of dogs snarling over a bone. We picked apart technique, choice of cropping, even choice of topic. Was it my colour mixing? What about my values, my composition? What’s missing? This wasn’t a simple process, and we came to no quick answer. We spent the better part of a year talking over and arguing over the missing ‘element’. Almost every piece we painted during this time fell short of the promise it made. Our skills improved, but the solution seemed as far away as ever. Then one day, we asked a question we had asked before, what was in the original scene that spoke to you? What compelled you to paint this particular scene? While we had asked these questions of ourselves many times before, this time we realized that they weren’t simple, throwaway questions. They were central to the success and failure of a painting. When we paint something because it speaks to us, and we hold that call in our minds, the results are more charged with something ephemeral, yet vital that other works don’t have. We had our answer. We were translating the scene with our paintings. Hacking away the unimportant to get to the visceral core of the matter. Our goal became to have our paintings speak the same voice the scene used to spoke to us. Keith |
Keith ThirgoodIs an artist working in the Canadian, post impressionist style. I paint en plein air when I can and in the studio the rest of the time. Archives
June 2019
Categories
All
|