Sometimes it’s the small things that make all the difference.
Artists working from life never reproduce exactly what they see. They might come close, but it wouldn’t be possible, really, because every time you look at something you notice something else and see it a little bit differently. The closer you look at a tuft of weeds, the more lights and half-lights, shadows, subtle color variations, and the more leaves, stems, etc. etc. that you begin to see. At some point you have to stop seeing and start making choices.
It’s in that gap, between what we can see and what we paint, that the art comes in.
At first glance there’s very little difference between the photograph above (left) and the demonstration painting on the right by Clyde Aspevig. But look closely from one to the other and you begin to see lots of differences – adjustments the artist made in the values, the shapes, the colors, the direction of the lines and edges of everything, what to leave in and what to leave out.
At the highest level, there’s composition and design. He probably chose the scene as we see it in the initial photo reference because there’s already a natural design in it, with the stream being an entry-point for the eye at the lower left corner. However, comparing left to right, you can see what he changed.
You can tell that Aspevig was thinking in terms of how to distribute the shapes and angles within the confines of the canvas rather than in terms of transcribing one-for-one what he was looking at. In this case, he tilted up the angles on the top left (both in the grass bank and along the tops of the bushes) so they would point back down into the painting more conclusively.
He used value and temperature adjustments to mute the unimportant background and to highlight the “curl” that starts in the lower left and spirals us in.
There are other changes too that only a trained eye would think to make, all of which transforms a mere transcription of something seen into work of art.
Clyde Aspevig is a consummate landscapist with the unerring vision and seemingly effortless technique of only the best traditional representational artists. He teaches his methods in a blockbuster video that’s available at three different pricing tiers. Check it out here.
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