Trying to pull out discernible and meaningful shapes from all this will be very difficult.īeware of overcast and cloudy days. The photo above lacks differentiation, in part, because it was taken on an overcast day. Squint at this photo and you’ll see that the entire hill and foreground brush is more or less one large value mass. Shapes tend to glom together in large undifferentiated masses. When a photo has poor differentiation, you can hardly tell where one value ends and another begins. Photos with Poor Differentiationĭifferentiation is achieved primarily through distinct value differences.

But trying to differentiate all those values in a painting will be next to impossible. Because the photo is so sharp and captures hundreds of subtle value shifts, we think it’s clear. When the values of shapes are too close, they tend to merge, and where they merge, we lose the ability to differentiate one shape from another.

Poor differentiation is usually the result of values being too close. Of the many faults a photo may have, a lack of differentiation is the most serious.

How the Direction of the Light Affects Differentiation.

These guidelines also hold true when workin from life, en plein air. These guidelines are directed at finding shapes that are clear and readable. In this guide, I’ll review the essential qualities to look for - and to avoid - in your reference photos. This makes it easy to overlook a photo’s flaws - things like overly dark or overly light values, or poorly differentiated shapes. We might be able to accept these flaws in a photo (because it looks so realistic) but if we carry that information into our paintings, our work will suffer. We have been so exposed to photographic imagery our whole lives (including moving images like TV, movies, and video), that we readily accept them as a faithful stand-in for reality. However, photographs also contain misleading and unreliable information. They are also a reliable reference for detail. They can capture a fleeting moment in the form of a person or animal, or a short-lived atmospheric effect. They allow us to work with subjects that we would otherwise not be able access for any length of time, either because of safety concerns or extreme weather conditions. (See The Gifts of Plein Air – Living Color through Direct Observation.) But photos do offer some very practical benefits. Of course, nothing replaces painting from life and nothing should.

Note: If you have been directed to this post in advance of a workshop with me, be sure to read the section at the end Tips on Preparing for My Workshops.Īs digital photography and image editing apps have become more ubiqitous, painters are using photographic reference more than ever.

Landscape painter's workbook