How to Make Dramatic Paintings from Your Photographs

[Music] hi Ian Roberts mastering composition and the laboratory of the painting process I said last week that I had a special announcement for this week and I had a technological snafu and it's not ready but you know in another week or two it'll come about but first off I hope you're doing well and your family's doing well and everything's okay we're in LA here and doing okay we can still go out for walks which is nice I'm taking more walks with my wife and I've taken a long time which is great but it also gave me a chance to think like oh what am I going to do this week's video on I sort of realized last night and I was thinking about a little bit more about an inspiration and the quality of our attention I was thinking about the role of vision and skill and how they need to balance one another about working in series you know the way say Diebenkorn or more Andy or God does I wanted to talk about four grounds at one point that difficult because they're up close but they still need to have you know engagement and the role of foreground middle-ground and background in a landscape and how they sort of play like a stage set of where they sit in space but as it happened one viewer was saying why don't you talk more about the photographs you use and like that and so I just chose six photographs that I've made paintings from and I thought I would just briefly talk about each one and you'll see that I'm using the big shapes of the photograph and then simplifying it down so I thought that'd be useful we'll do that today and I'll see at the end this is Stonington main early morning and there's lovely light on this beautiful sort of sense of light into the distance what I wanted to work on you'll see is the foreground there's a patch of light here but I don't like the way this bush is jammed up in the foreground so you'll see my main focus was giving myself room as if I was standing 15 feet back from that so we have an object overlapping an object that takes us into the landscape that we're looking at and then back into the distance but you can see how simply everything is painted as shapes using that basic structure of what was there this is a market scene in carpenter France and I just really liked this lady and the way the light was hitting her right here and so I focused on that you know what you'll see all this stuff sort of disappears he disappears he doesn't have light on him it's just simplified into the biggest shapes and I've extended this so that there's more dark on this side coming over to this simple figure here and the lights and the light in the dark this is also improve us and you'll notice in the painting how I've blued this out to push it further back so we're kind of forced into the mid-ground and then I have patches of sunlight coming through the mid the foreground in order to give it more interest and kind of break it up but you see I've blew that out it's further back then we're forced into looking at this part and that's now the background very clearly and then the sunlight coming through here gives us interest as we get back there but you're seeing at you see I keep very simple shapes everything is just clearly a shape overlapping shape shape overlapping to create the structure of depth this is pretty green but I just love that shadow being cast across the foreground you'll see how much information is here in the background it's obviously getting grayed out and lighter because of atmospheric perspective but you'll see I and how scraggly silhouetted these trees are so you can see I've simplified it dramatically these straggly trees are very simple now the background has been raised up but it's much bluer I still love this big shadow shape and the sky I love it just weird green color with this kind of warm cloud in it but just big simple shapes using the main structure of the photograph but then using that just as a place to jump off from this is also Provence and you'll notice in the photograph how the light is obviously hitting through the mid-ground which is where I want us to look in the painting right here is where I want you to go I bring a shaft of light into the foreground but look at the background if we think of this as where you want us to look and the mid-ground foreground mid-ground this all becomes background here and you'll see that this whole section here I've treated more simply this I've treated very simply this I've Blut made larger and blue down this little Hill here I've made blue blue and pushed it further back still so you can see I'm using the main shapes and structure of the photograph I'm just simplifying it the whole thing here is very simple with that shaft of light across it this is where I want you to look and that I'm simplifying everything back here so that they just start to become more like background clearly background way into the background so you'll see here this strong line running back to here these beautiful reflections doing the same but look at this tree here which ends here and this is further back and then this comes forward again this is further back and then this jumps back a long way but if you actually look at it you can't really tell so you'll see that I'm making very clear distinction between this plane this plane and this plane and using the main structure of the shapes of this particular photograph so you can see I've changed the colors but I'm using those shapes to bring us back to here and it's reflection but then just look at that there's that then clearly that steps and that steps back again so I'm structuring I'm using the simple shapes but I'm using it to create structure also so I hope you found that engaging and helpful another week I think I'll talk about look at photographs that I'm still thinking about like they might be good potential images and talk about what I like and don't like about them and why I'm being drawn to them or maybe maybe not doing them and also I can just say that the number of photographs I take a lot of photographs I don't take snapshots of people and things I just take photographs that might be able to use for paintings and even doing that I'd say one in 50 I'm really excited about making a painting about so it takes a lot of photographs to get things and you're just sort of the kind of things you start taking photographs of changes to be more and more useful I think over time I know as I've worked with students they often after I've talked with them look at their photographs and realize well based on that most of these aren't really much use so anyway that's a discussion for another time so I hope you have a great week I hope everything's ok relatively speaking in your world and I hope you're safe I hope you're not sick and I will see you next week have a great week and get some time if you've got any opportunity to put into your voice your creativity your expression and I'll see you next Tuesday bye for now

Channel: Ian Roberts

Views: 244,983

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Id: XRZizREXjt8

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020