Painting Camping in Spearfish, South Dakota
Summer Vibes 2024
One thing I love about painting from reference photos is that they are always just a guide. You can try to be as accurate as possible or you can take whatever artistic license you want. You don’t like the time of day? Change it. You want to remove that wonky tree? Go ahead. More often, I use my reference photo to get the basic shapes onto my painting paper. My paintings are often quite similar to the reference, but I’m not usually tied to making it a perfect representation of the photograph. With this year’s Summer Vibes Project, rather than make one painting based on one reference photo, I have decided to paint a small series of paintings using the same image. I’m still in the early stages of the project, but I wanted to see what would happen if I painted a reference photo more than once. Would all of the paintings look the same? How would they be different? What if I switched up the main focus of the painting? What if I tried painting the same image but at different scales? What if I changed the time of day or the colors to be different from the photograph?
With all of these thoughts bouncing around my head, I picked up the first reference photo from my stack. The photograph was taken at dusk the evening that we arrived at our campsite in Spearfish, South Dakota a couple years ago. This was the first stop on a two week vacation - Glacier National Park was our main destination. This certainly isn’t an award winning photograph. It’s a little dark, there is literally a restroom in the frame, but this photograph reminds me of how peaceful the campsite was. We arrived during the week, so there were only a few people staying in the free campground.
Camping in Spearfish, South Dakota No. 1
5.5 x 7.25 inches
I wanted my first painting to be a close representation of the photograph. I wanted to match the colors of the sky and how the sky seems to illuminate the dirt road through the campground. I wanted green to be a dominant color, but the challenge would be to differentiate the green of the trees from the green of the meadows. And because I get to change things I do not like, I decided to add a tent to the painting instead of painting the restrooms. The tent even matches the one that we typically use to camp.
Favorite part of this painting:
I really like the trees in the background. I wanted to see if I could give the impression of a forest of trees without having to add a lot of details or paint a bunch of individual trees. I really like the different values of greens and feel like the lighter green trees are illuminated by the setting sun.
Least favorite part of this painting:
The dirt road. It seems more like a walking path than a road.
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Camping in Spearfish, South Dakota No. 2
5 x 7 inches
For the second painting, I wanted to zoom in on the tent and to try a landscape orientation. I wanted the emphasis to be on the tent and the way the light was hitting the meadow where the tent was located. Here I also tried to experiment a little bit with texture, which I always find to be challenging with watercolor. I played with different brushes, a combination of vertical and horizontal brush strokes, as well as using a dry brush to make more scratchy textures.
Favorite part of this painting:
The gold part of the hill. Reflecting on this painting, I wish I had used more brown, golds, and reds to give the grassy area a little more depth.
Least favorite part of this painting:
The grassy area on the left side of the painting. The colors seem a bit cooler than the rest of the painting and that part of the painting draws my eye more than I want it to.
Camping in Spearfish, South Dakota No. 3
3 x 4.5 inches
I went a very different direction with this one. I wanted to try something that was a little more abstract and create a painting that had much more white space than my paintings typically have. I wasn’t feeling particularly confident when I started this painting, so I decided that a mini would be the best way to go. I love a mini and if I really hated the outcome, I wouldn’t have wasted very much paper. The way I approached this painting was to think about what I really love about my original reference photo, which included the sky and the contrast of the green of the trees with the browns of the dirt road. I wanted to try and paint just enough for the viewer to understand what they were looking at and trust that the viewer’s brain would fill in any missing information. I tried to balance between working wet on wet while trying not to mess with the paint too much when I first applied it to the paper. I did add some finer details, such as small lines for grass, but I wanted them to be limited.
Favorite part of this painting:
I love the sky. I really like the watercolor blooms that I achieved with the dark blue at the top of the sky and I like the contrast with the pinks and yellows. If you look closely at the painting, it is as if the sun is poking out behind the colorful clouds.
Least favorite part:
The drip on the right hand side. Admittedly, I was experimenting. I have seen other artists create really interesting effects by applying a lot of water and paint to their paper and then seeing what gravity does with it. I’m happy that I tried this idea, but I didn’t like how it came out. To me, it looks like a mistake on the painting.
Camping in Spearfish, South Dakota No. 4
5 x 7 inches
For version four, I wanted to try to improve upon my first painting. I felt like my spacing of the photograph’s elements - hills, road, main tree in the foreground - were a bit off in the final painting. For this revised version:
I eliminated one hill on the right side of the painting so that there were only two.
I lightened the meadow area around the tent.
I made the transition of colors in the sky a bit smoother.
I made the dirt road a bit bigger so that it seems closer to a road than a path.
I shifted the foreground pinetree further outside of the frame.
Personally I like this version better. The sky and the dirt road are especially closer to what I was hoping to accomplish with painting this reference photo.
Surprisingly, I enjoyed the process of painting the same reference photo multiple times. With each version, I had a better sense of how I wanted my trees to look, what colors I wanted, and what brushes and techniques to use to create a particular texture and effect. I especially enjoyed how my mini abstract came out. This was very different from my normal style of painting, but it gave me some new ideas to experiment with.
Which is your favorite?
Learn more about this year’s Summer Vibes project in this blog post.