Gathering reference with photos & sketching

Franklin House Series, Journal # 1

I’ve been having a bit of a slow year, creatively. There’s been small bursts of work, here and there, but mostly, the last few months have been quiet and reluctant. In an effort to motivate myself out of the furrow I seem to have settled into, I decided to undertake a painting project from start to end, and challenge myself to document the process.

With the weather changing to beautiful autumn and crisp winter, I wanted an element of this project to be outside. I wanted it to be close by, so I could visit the location multiple times over the coming weeks. I definitely wanted to work from observation, I wanted the subject to be something I could experience in real life. But I also knew that this is a busy time of year and I can’t just disappear into the mountains for a week or two.

On the studio side of the project, I also set myself some parameters: to focus on sketches, colour studies, composition, and technique for a couple of weeks, before settling on which compositions I would paint. And to aim to make a series of 3+ works, at least one of them large.

For the subject, I decided on the lovely National Trust property, Franklin House. It’s nearby, and has a very lovely garden. I like the presence of the house, the structures in the garden (espaliered trees, arches, fountains, and old sheds), and the beautiful, tumultuous planting of the flower beds.

My first trip to Franklin House, I brought a sketchbook, pencil, and my (phone) camera. I walked the entire garden and took some pictures whenever I found something that caught my eye.

I then revisited the areas I had found most interesting, and this time I sat for a while with my sketchbook and pencil, and played around with the view in a series of compositional thumbnails. Sometimes, it was very clear what I could potentially turn into a painting, and sometimes, it was quite a bit harder to find the painting in the view. The ability to look at a scene before you and find the potential of a painting in it is a skill, and one I am working on building.

For reference photos, I try to focus in on what I am interested in capturing in my painting, whether it’s shape, or light, or depth, or a particular object. I take a number of photos from different angles or perspectives. The idea is not to have any one photo to use as reference, but an assortment of different ones. I don’t want to copy a single photo for my paintings, but I use them as a sort of raw material to build my painting from.

After a couple of hours, I had plenty of photos and sketches, and it was time to head back to the studio. In the next blog, I’ll take you through how I sort through my mass of photos and find the gem of new ideas.

(Continued in part two, coming soon.)