Landscape And The Use Of Reference Photography

**Simonstalenhag** · September 20th, 2006, 05:59 PM

Hi again. Here's my latest landscape. It's an old idea that I've had since I first saw that rusty ball, whatever it is, and I've used it before in a gouache painting but since I've just bought a wacom I thought it would be fun doing it digitally. Ok, I might have overdone it a bit. I'm working with a lot of reference photography, I'm out scouting for cool locations and this kind of rusty stuff all the time, I love it and I have more than 10 000 photos only from the last three years. They function mostly as inspiration and for detail study. But in this one I feel something spooky is going on. I'm talking about the chairs and table mostly 'cus there are so much lighting stuff going on there with the refraction of the snow and all that I might have missed something. I mean perhaps it's there on the pixels but maybe I didn't grasp the whole concept of it entirely when I painted it. Maybe I just looked at my photos and like, duplicated. Hmm... how should one stay realistic without losing that "human" feel? One way is to use texture and use a more scetchy and impressionistic style, certainly since the wacom really invites to it but since I mostly paint in watercolor and gouache I think it's so nice to work "clean" when I'm in photoshop.

Any ideas?

(I'm sorry for the resolution but so much got lost in lower res.)

**Simonstalenhag** · September 20th, 2006, 06:10 PM

It' just hit me when looking at my post here that another thing that might be a little funny is how the different pieces blend. The reference photos I use is one recent (the chairs) and a pretty old one (the rusty ball), and they where taken completely without any deliberate connection. So one effect in the finished result is a montage kinda look...hmm that's sad. Anyway here's that other gouache painting I was talking about: