Watercolor: Painting a landscape from multiple reference photo's

Tuscan Memories
12 x 16 Watercolor Painting
by Pat Fiorello

I did the painting above as a demonstration in my landscape painting class this week. Part of the purpose of the demonstration was to show students techniques for painting a landscape and the sequencing of what comes first etc..  But also I wanted to show  how to go beyond sticking to painting from a single photo and how to plan and design a painting using multiple photo's.

Initial reference photo

I liked this one not only because of the memories associated with it from one of my early trips to Tuscany, but also because I liked the chunk of light buildings, clustered in an interesting shape surrounded by the dark trees. However the foreground left a bit to be desired. so I went to other photo's of that same area to see what other elements I could include.

 I found some Scotch broom wildflowers that are all over Tuscany and thought might make a good lead in to the painting and also an opportunity to introduce some more vivid color

Flower reference

Then I  thought it might be nice to include some vineyards for directional purposes and to be more attractive than the dirt in the original reference photo foreground . The vineyards are of course authentic to Tuscany so it would be plausible that there were some vineyards in this scene.

Reference photo for suggestion of vineyards

 Finally I put the elements together in a very simple value sketch with 3 values that reminded me of my light areas- sky and architecture, my dark areas; the trees, and then everything else was pretty much in between. I used Sepia and did it in watercolor. I find if I use a pencil I want to get too detailed, so I prefer to use a brush or big markers for my value sketches. In fact I think I'll start calling them value plans, because sketch conjures up a lot more drawing and detail than is needed at this point. Note I also sized my value plan to be proportionate to the final painting. I knew I was going to do the demo on a 12 x 16 block of watercolor paper, so my plan was 1/2 that size 6 x 8.

With my value plan and photo's available, I completed the demo of Tuscany Memories above.  It was a good warm up for me too as I'll be teaching a workshop in Tuscany in a few weeks.

simple value sketch- 3 values