As a subject to paint, what's wrong with this photo?
There's a nagging frustration when photographing flowers for reference material because, under a bright light source, most of our cameras bleach out the
halftones and make shadows far too dark. It's a joy to take travel painting gear to a flower garden and discover the nuances of color right before our eyes, especially a peony, but it's quite shocking to take a photo of that same flower and find so much missing.
Here's a study done on my computer to illustrate.
Using notes from my sketchbooks, I put this together to show an idea of how we might see this peony on location. Although my notes came from my study of a tiger lily, the principle remains the same. The
camera will record shadow areas too dark, and often totally loses the variations in the halftone areas. It will often bleach out a full two-to-three values of color.
Here are some of the photo's peony halftones I found missing from the photo.
If photos are your only resource and you want to compensate for their inadequacies, a good exercise is to determine the local colors, create a
full value scale for each of those colors, then create a second value scale of the local color's complement for mixing less saturated color you see. In your painting, use the colors from your value scales for the missing tones.
This exercise also makes it possible to find and adjust those less saturated tones in shadows.
Enjoy a Lovely Weekend as We Enter Daylight Savings Time.
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