Sundays are my day to do landscapes. But it was cold and I was feeling lazy so I decided to stay in and painting a Kinderdijk Netherlands landscape from photos I took while we were in Europe in September.
Last week when I painting from a photo graph I had three different photos to look at for reference. Each on had different exposures so I could get more detail out of shadows while at the same time seeing all of the subtle values in the light areas. Unfortunately there were minimal shots of this scene of the windmills in Kinderdijk so I couldn’t get much detail out of the shadow areas.
The dead shadows is one of the most obvious things that I have observed while working from photos and the only way to work through this issue is to over expose one of the photos to see more detail in the shadows. Of course this will destroy most of the light areas of the photo.
I’m not going to sell this painting. Not that I don’t like how I painted it. In attempts to conserve supplies I painted over an older painting that was very bad, but the canvas was not prepared well and its so porous that it kills any brushwork on such a small painting. Either I need to get rid of all my canvas boards and move to gessoed masonite, or I need to prepare the canvases better with many coats of gesso.
