Diane asked “Could you include … some thoughts on cropping an image? …. Every once in a while, I find that I must crop an image or adjust it to get a good painting from a photograph.”
Cropping for paint-suitability and size-appropriateness is invariably a good idea. Many photos, even professionally taken photos, do not necessarily make the best compositions in paint. Size can be a factor too. I’ve just completed a full size painting from a smaller painting that I did a few years ago. I actually had to make the figures larger in relationship with the canvas (essentially re-cropping my earlier work) in order to make the painting look right.
I would almost assume that a photo could be improved in some way – that’s one of the benefits of a composition sketch.
A composition sketch serves to organize the picture space, simplify forms, look at what’s important and (more importantly) what’s not: Invariably, photos have too much detail and picking out what is important is best done before you paint. Also, things may not be where you want them, so you can easily move stuff around. You can also easily check out different scenarios – that holiday shot should probably be cropped!
A value sketch is not a bad idea either, perhaps that’s the subject of another post!
Break-a-Brush!
David
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