Photo Reference vs. Painting from Life - Streamline Publishing (2024)

We’ve all heard the arguments for and against painting from photographs, so I’m not going to rehearse them here. To cut to the chase, there is NOTHING WRONG with painting from photographs, especially for beginners.

There will never be a final answer concerning whether it’s better to paint from life than from photos because both are good, for different reasons. It all comes down to which skills you choose to develop and why.

There are certainly things you can learn best by painting from life. Plein air painting, for example, forces you to practice what you know about composition and design, perspective, atmosphere, color-matching, and value-judging. Working from a photo, on the other hand, makes it easier to quickly develop key skills such as working with details, scale and proportion.

If we’re talking big picture, the whole debate of photo reference vs. “pure” plein air painting (or working from a live model or a still-life set-up) overlooks the ultimate goals of visual art. In the end, it’s not primarily about the level of representation vs. abstraction, the faithfulness to what’s visibly there or the all-important matters of composition and design. Those things are important but what matters most in the end, is the quality of the artist’s involvement in the subject and the amount of mind, heart, and soul he or she gets into the work.

The danger in painting from photos is the same danger as in painting from life. There is a time for copying and a time for expression. It’s easy to become a slave to representing what’s there, thus robbing yourself of the opportunity to express your own underlying feelings and ideas about what’s there.

When painting from life, direct observation, as in plein air painting, submerges you in multi-sensory experiences. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your skillset and your intentions!

Painting from life invites some artists to be more expressive or to become intimate with a subject in a way that a phone’s camera does not. But using reference photos ensures fidelity to the way things really look and also serves to simplify design.

Reference photos let you take your time in the studio without constantly changing light and atmosphere. They can be necessary reminders about what things really do look like, too. For example, an artist might want to pause and study a photo to see how grape stems branch out when they’re painting a bunch of grapes largely from memory.

Painting from life, many say, encourages a more active engagement with the subject. This in turn influences color and temperature decisions and choices about how and where to move the eye, what to leave in, what to leave out, and what to flat-out invent in the heat of the moment.

Painting from life is one of the best ways to grow as an artist – but so is copying photos as well as other paintings!

Perhaps American illustrator Dean Cornwell summed it up well when he said, “Do what the camera can’t do – the camera can’t add the spiritual.” The sooner one gets to that point as an artist the better, by whatever means necessary.

Others would say it isn’t even about whether or not you should use photos in your work, it’s just about how you do so. If you’d like to learn the “right” way to use photo references to make amazing paintings, check out a few of these selected instructional videos.

And if you’re interested in ramping up your technique in general, have a look at Clyde Aspevig. He incorporates both plein-air and in-studio approaches in his renowned paintings. (Clyde’s work illuminates this issue of Inside Art.)

William Trost Richards, Reprise

A Quick Second Look at Yesterday’s Featured Artist

Born and raised in Philadelphia, William Trost Richards took lessons with the German immigrant painter Paul Weber, as well as at the Pennsylvania Academy, before journeying to Europe in 1855-56, where he briefly studied in Düsseldorf, at that time a center for young American artists.

After his return to the United States, Richards began to work directly from nature, sketching in the mountains of both New York State and Pennsylvania, as well as along the East Coast. “February” is an exception to the marine paintings that began to preoccupy Richards after the late 1860s.

In this landscape, painted near the artist’s farm in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Richards evokes the chill and stillness of winter through the lowering gray sky, barren trees in the foreground, and his characteristic silvery tones.

The artist manages to convey a dual sense of the truth-to-nature advocated by John Ruskin’s “Modern Painters” and the Pre-Raphaelite artists he admired: not only accurate topography but also the experience of the place, so vivid that the viewer can almost hear the crunch of footsteps across the frost-covered grass.

The Philadelphia Academy (where this painting is located) owns eight canvases and ten watercolors by Richards – a testament to his popularity with Philadelphia collectors. – source: PAFA