Can A Limited Palette Mean More Color? | Home | Why Spend Time Drawing if You’re A Painter?

August 3, 2007

When Good Painting Trips Go Bad

Have you ever been on a painting trip all excited and pumped about what you were accomplishing – visualizing wonderful larger studio paintings — only to get home and the paintings look flat and the photographs, as usual, look nothing like what you remember?  It’s times like these when I have to work hard at improving reference, stretching myself to make more progress as an artist, using imagination to see how many different compositions I can come up with, or forcing myself to do more color sketches with a variety of color schemes.

Two books that I recommend for compositions are John Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting which has a good chapter on composition and one on planes and angles of the landscape.  The other is Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar Payne.  I’ve used both of these books to bring out what I needed to work on.

[Slashdot] [Digg] [Reddit] [del.icio.us] [Facebook] [Technorati] [Google] [StumbleUpon]

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 12:26 pm and is filed under General. 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.

One Response to “When Good Painting Trips Go Bad”

  1. Eileen said:
    September 21st, 2008 at 9:53 pm

    So encouraged am I to read your entry “When Good Painting Trips Go Bad”. A recent landscape painting trip had driven me back to studio portraits exclusively. But after reading that you have had similiar experiences, I realize there is hope. I’ll keep plugging away, Phil, sketchbook in hand! DO COME BACK TO KANSAS CITY FOR A WORKSHOP AGAIN SOON!

Post your opinion

web site hit counter