TODAY'S FEATURED POST

Feeling Gray Today

Howard Lyon

-By Howard Lyon   Color is a fascinating and challenging part of painting.  It can be defined as hue, saturation and value. Today, I am going to focus a little more on saturation. Saturation being how intense or gray a color is. Before I get going though, I think I need to add a disclaimer to this post. Painting from life is the best way to understand color. Also, photographs of paintings are by no…

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EVERYDAY ORIGINAL

Fortuitous

YESTERDAY’S POST

Image

The danger of reference

Jesper Ejsing

April 28, 2025 - I use photo reference all the time. I try to put them away and work from imagination but then I get insecure and I start searching in books or on the internet for things looking like the stuff I am painting. Most time it creates a fake security and I continue painting what is needed for the image anyway without using the ref. But finding it, helped me in overcoming the insecurity anyway. I still think that reference is, by large, the killer of creativity. Here is 2 things I noticed: When I paint without reference the image becomes more dynamic and spontaneous and also more personal. When I paint from reference they become more realistic and believable, seems more precise but loose a bit of the personality. I talked to Paul Bonner one day,…

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