Here is a recent painting I did of a peak near Mont Blanc, along with the original photo. As you can see I made some changes. What drew me to paint this scene was the wonderful patch of light on the peak, followed by the majesty of the snow covered mountains. I wanted to capture these things in my painting, but had to decide whether to paint the scene exactly as it was in the photo or to ‘improve’ on nature.

The impressionist artist Paul Gauguin wrote: “A bit of advice – don’t copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result“.

It is a very rare thing when we can paint directly from a photo without the need to change things, move them around a bit, delete them or highlight them. That’s what art is. It is our interpretation of the scene in front of us. Some of the artist has to be mixed in with the art.

Telling a story

Every painting tells a story. Our job is to tell it as well as we can. What do we want to communicate to the viewer? How can we do that best?

In my painting above I chose to alter the colour palette and warm things up a bit, even though it was a snow scene. So I painted the sky in a warm cream and added this colour to some of the snow, contrasting this with the complimentary cool purple of the shadows. I also enhanced the colour variation on the foreground and middle distance hills. Just small changes, but I hope they are an improvement on the photo reference.

I hope that is a useful tip. Please give a thumbs up if it is, and I always love to read your comments. Thanks for being a part of this great art journey with me.