Painting from photos

I recently did a painting for my wife. She asked me to paint some horses and gave me a calendar with a bunch of horse photographs in it. The photo she chose was very dramatic with very intense colors. It looked like an HDR photo. I understand why she liked the photo, but as a reference for an oil painting, it was problematic.

Most art instructors will tell you that painting from life is the best way to paint realism. I’m sure this is true because you see everything yourself — no camera or printer is limiting value range or interpreting color differently. But painting portraits from life has some difficulties, especially animals. So, we resort to using photographs. But the quality of the reference photo has a big impact on the final painting.

I’ve seen youtube videos of people painting horses and even dogs from life, but the results are … not what I’m trying to achieve. So, how do we choose a photo to paint from? I have friends that want me to paint their animal and show me a photo taken with their phone. These are usually nice to look at on a phone, but make for very poor reference photos to paint from. They are usually not in full focus (“boca” is a huge problem with photos as references for paintings). The colors are usually enhanced, which is very different from how things look in real life. And the lighting is usually not very good (hot spots or generally poor exposure settings).

The same is true for human portraits. Glamour photos are not good painting references. Trying to explain this is sometimes tricky. I usually just tell people if the photo is over exposed or the colors are enhanced, the painting will look too illustrative (like a cartoon). If the focus is too shallow, I’ll have to imagine what should have been there to make up depth and realism (imagine a photo where the nose is in focus but the eyes aren’t).

So, why not paint people from life? Surely they can sit still, right? Well, I usually spend a minimum of 20 hours or more on a portrait (not a sketch). This would require somebody to be available to sit still for hours a day over a few days — in the same clothes. The kind of people who want a portrait done don’t usually have that kind of time or temperament.

I prefer to take my own photos as references for a portrait. But, I realize there are going to be times where that’s not practical and I’ll need to rely on a photo reference from a client. I plan to work on writing up good guidelines on how to take a reference photo for a painting and share it with people who want me to paint their animals — and hope they’re able to pull it off.