How to stop copying your reference photo: Friday Live painting session

If you find yourself frustrated by gtting ever closer to your reference photo, today's Friday Live session is for you. The answer that I find works most often has two parts: 1. Simplify 2. Give yourself permission to explore Of course it's easy to say that. Much harder to do. So today, I'm going to be doing both those things on paintings from two different reference photos. Firstly, I'm going to be taking a painting in progress and, rather than just adding more detail from the photo reference, I'm going to see how I might be able to make it more interesting as a painting, see where it might go without trying to "finish" it. That doesn't necessarily mean making huge changes. Just giving the painting what it feels like it needs, rather than just adding more detail. Secondly, I'm going to start a new painting from the reference photo above, to show how drastic simplification can open up the possibilities of a painting, while building a strong foundation to explore from at the same time. To me, paintings work best when you're not following a map from a start point to an end point, but when you're allowing yourself to go down some side roads along the way that might end up taking you to a completely different destination. REFERENCE PHOTO: https://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/wp-... ----------------------------- USEFUL LINKS ----------------------------- If you're interested in learning with me, you can see the online art school I run here: https://courses.learning-to-see.co.uk... The online art school give you access to a bunch of courses, membership in my wonderful (and private) artist's community, live critique calls and a bunch of other stuff. There's no minimum period and you can cancel at any time. The app I use when I'm teaching to investigate the colour is called ChromaMagic. It's a fantastic learning tool. You can find it on the Apple and Google Play stores, and there is also a Windows version. It's very inexpensive and extremely useful! If you struggle at all with judging values and colours, or with mixing, this is a great tool to help you calibrate your eye. You can get the Munsell value scale - which allows you to translate values from the app directly to your painting - from Paul Centore on Ebay here, also very inexpensive: https://www.ebay.com/itm/223003792036 Subscribe to my email list to get notifications of future live streams and other helpful info about painting in oils: https://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/sub...