Summer is the time for lighthouses and lakes
OK, breaktime over. Back in this post I said I would be taking a break from painting in oils and returning to watercolors for a while. But I felt the summer was slipping away, and I hadn’t done a painting of a lighthouse. How can it be summer if there are no lighthouse paintings? Oh, and maybe a lake as well. So hereby will follow two month-old paintings in oils that I’ve done from year-or-so-old photos.
Lighthouse | Stephen Springer Davis | 2009
Lakeside | Stephen Springer Davis | 2009
Since I mentioned that these paintings were done from photographs, I thought I’d discuss that process a bit.
When I get the chance to go away somewhere, it seems I rarely have the time to actual do any painting, or the weather is bad. Consequently I take pictures that I’ll later paint from, mostly in the winter months. I have a 22″ monitor set up next to my easel in my studio, along with a lamp that has a daylight-emulating bulb. For the sake of doing a painting, the image on the screen becomes my world.
The problem is that this world is still small, and usually the shadows in photos become problematic because they look black, and have little visible detail. So I have to make up the detail in shadows based on experience. The process is not perfect, but otherwise I’d perhaps only finish on painting a year.
Tags: landscape painting, oil painting
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 5:22 am and is filed under Current work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.