Thank you for watching this video on choosing images to paint. All of these images are free to use for paintings. Digital reproductions of any kind other than sharing this video are not allowed without permission. Painting is about understanding How will you successfully paint a scene if you don’t know what you like about
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Do you ever struggle with water that seems to fall right off the canvas? It’s frustrating to have a brilliantly painted ship with areas of water looks as if they are sloping or, at least not level. Here is some advice for how you can stop water looking as if it is falling away in one direction or
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Here are a few tips for good sunset photographs since many of us start there, this is general advice, any modern digital camera will have these options: 1) Don’t center the sun (it’s bad for composition and the camera can’t handle it) 2) Use a daylight or cloudy white balance instead of AWB 3) Play
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Grays do a couple of things. First, grays enhance the warm and cool variations in a scene that make sunsets, sunrises, bright days, and moonlit nights so spectacular. Second, grays are necessary for keeping colors clean. Grays are crucial in representational art because our world is full of lowly saturated colors. All too often we
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Short strokes are usually the way to go. It’s important to leave rocks with solid forms. Sometimes the shadow areas have to be left with less information than we might really see because it creates a more blocky, solid form. To get a quick overview of strokes, see the Strokes Examples. When you add water
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Waves are a central part of seascapes, whether the image is of huge barrels and crashers or small swells. The allure of the sea is created by those waves and their sounds, their shapes, and colors, and motions. A wave is made up of the face, the crest, and the trough. For a broader guide
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Rivers, creeks, and streams are one of the ways that water appears in landscapes. Water can add so much to a scene by creating path and breaking up colors. The water in this stream had the typical grays, blues, and purples, but also browns, yellows, and greens reflected from the surround objects. There is plenty
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Skies can be either the dominant or supporting part in a landscape. When they are dominant, let them fill up at least two thirds of the image. If the sky takes up that much space, it must have something interesting to support that. A blue sky or sky with small color gradations should not be
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Trees are so diverse. To summarize them is a challenge, but not impossible. They can be painted on any number of scales but it goes back to finding shapes. It’s especially important with leafy trees to define interesting sky holes to create negative space. Negative space is formed by the absence of branches or leaves
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