Day Two at Kanuga - a Practical Design Lesson

What a great lesson today, great fun for the likes of me!  We started with a choice of one of two vacation “snapshots”, provided by Judy. Our assignment was to find what we liked about the source, and what we wanted it to say, then to modify the source to make a well designed painting.  We used black and white copies, scissors, tape, tracing paper, plain paper, gray markers in various values, white correction pens and chalk.  We rearranged conflicting shapes, removed or modified confusing elements, changed values from light to dark or vice versa.  And of course, ended up with a different solution for each of us.

This is the original photograph.

  

This was my take.

 I completely omitted the church tower in the center, changed the building on the left to be a very light value, and the sky to a middle value. I removed the confusing awnings from the building.   I also messed with the lantern to make it even more important in the composition.   The instructor thought it was a very strong solution.  Won’t be painting it: next we are starting over with our own source photos. 

This technique makes me feel like I’ll be going back to my drawers full of mediocre vacation photos to see which of them might make a smashing painting! It takes a bit of time, but feels like a reasonable way to use source photos, yet  free oneself from literal interpretation.