How to Create a Painting From a Photo

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Sherie Tengbergen and I'm the author of the DVD, The Watercolor Gourmet Cooks for You. In this clip, I'm going to show you how to make a painting from a photograph. Now, when you turn your work into galleries and shows, it's very important that if you do use a photograph, it is one you've taken yourself because otherwise they will disqualify you. Here is an example of a photograph that I took when I was up in New York of a bird house. And what I did is, I just took a pencil and very lightly on my watercolored paper I sketch down the bird house. Now, one of the things that I like to do with my photograph is I like to look and see if I really want everything in them. They call that artist prerogative. I don't want all of this junk in the back here, these leaves and whatever this is. So, when I go to paint this in, I'm going to paint blue sky right there. So, let's get started. And by the way, when you do draw in pencil on your watercolored paper, make sure you go very softly. You don't want to drench your watercolored paper or what will happen is all the paint color will go right into that dent and you'll get a dark line where you may not want one to be. So, as you can see, I've used my artist prerogative, gotten rid of this place behind here and put in a nice blue sky. Now, I've taken Windsor blue, burnt sienna and a little bit of cadmium red and mix them together to form the gray of my tree here. So, I'm going to go ahead and start with my round brush, painting in lightly the bark of this tree and I want to make sure that I get all kinds of different colors going on so that my bark looks old and really nodded. And I'm going to just put a base color down now because when this dries, I'm going to go back in with my very fine brush and put all these tiny little nut holes in details that we see in our picture. Make sure when you're painting from a photograph that you look closely at all the detail. Detail is what makes a difference between a good painting and poor painting. So, as you can see, I'm going to continue to fill in a little bit of color on my background and I try to work all over my painting at the same time so that I'm not just sticking in one spot. You want to have your colors moving around, getting different, values going so that you can see how whole painting is going to turn out when you're done. As you can see, I'm just about finished with this. I'm going to put a little bit of detail on here with a very fine brush to bring out some of the lines in the detail and by following these techniques you'll come up with a really nice painting from a photograph. This is Sherie Tengbergen and thank you for watching."