Matt Smith has seen a common frustration throughout his teaching career when students deviate from the photograph, or from what they see from painting from life. In the beginning of his career, Matt even struggled with deviating from what he saw on a photo reference or in the field. Most artists do.

First of all, geography is a great tool, but it has to be balanced with direct observation. This is easy to do in the studio because you can set up your model. Outdoor photography is important because we can’t bring the subject back in. In order to know where a camera might be lying to you, you need to be out in the field observing and creating paintings. Bad value and color relationships are common to a camera. The stronger your understanding of foundational principles, the more you can employ those principles to fix the problems you see in photography. This could be something like distortion. You will be able to identify distortion if you understand linear perspective. If you are using a telephoto lens and you are compressing planes, you are going to start pulling the background forward, and that is when you need to know proportion or shape. The more you understand those, the more you can move away from the reference photo and address it.

Now, when you are in the field, you might be looking at a foreground of sage and it’s not designed, but rather is randomly scattered in an organic way. But, again, if you understand linear perspective, you can paint and design openings in that sage that lead you to specific points. Or, take you from point A to B to C. Even though a lot of people think they might be beyond the foundational principles of drawing, value, design, and color, everyone really needs to be disciplined in these. You need to keep coming back to it. It is very interesting, but these principles are most important to our actions as artists. 

Outdoors and landscape rarely ever presents themselves in a fully designed way. You are going to have to make changes. When you come indoors and have a less-than-perfect reference photo, which you always have with a photograph, you will need to make those changes. Everything we see in nature is perfect and organic. But, it can be a different story once we get to our canvas. You may see three or four areas that really jump out or specific elements within a composition and motif. Once you find those, you now need to tie those all together. We need to know how to arrange those elements so our attention isn’t all over the place. This comes from a strong understanding of those core principles (line, value, shape, texture, edges, color, etc.). All of that stuff comes into play when bringing a reference indoors and having to make those changes.

Want to study more with Matt Smith? Join him below!

Listen to Gabor and Matt on the Paint & Clay Podcast here.