#30×30, 2025, Day 02: More 4″ Mini’s!

You can see how working small is the ultimate trick :)

You could probably do all thirty in a day if you felt like it. Now of course – I’m not going to JUST do miniatures. But I’m having fun and feeling the annual rust flaking off :)

I am using photos (mostly videos) for inspiration, but I’m doing a lot of interpretation; just as you would in real life of course. That’s the beauty of these landscapes; they’re really abstractions.

In no particular order here’s some random thoughts about painting from found images online:

I’ve had the great fortune to do a lot of travelling and painting, but I’ll never have the time and money to go everywhere I’d like to. Plus we’re getting older. This is a way I can travel the world.

When I look at my paintings on the wall, I honestly feel like I’ve been to that place. (Even if I haven’t).

These paintings are not *just* copies of someone’s photographs. I don’t have any artistic embarrassment about using found photos. After I’m done, it’s a transformative work, created in my own style from a spark of inspiration.

Transformative work is completely fair game under copyright laws. Nobody wholly owns the earth, and nobody can say an artist cannot use their eyes to look, and their skills to create. Frankly (and you might not like this) the AI companies are about to radically expand the legal precedent for transformative work – I bet it happens this year. Certainly with in the next five.

Plus; my paintings don’t reduce the value of a found photo or video. To be brutally honest – I’m not exactly selling a lot of landscape painting. So I’m not taking anyone’s lunch money. And even if I was (or will be someday?) my paintings are not diverting sales that would otherwise go to the travel ‘grammers. They’re not, by and large, in the business of selling art.

If anything, I could theoretically send them *more* traffic if I were winning prizes or publishing books, and that is what they really want.

We’ll cross that bridge when and if we come to it.

And finally – I don’t look for great photographers. (Anymore. There was I time I did) I’ve come to feel; if you use a professional shot, they’ve already made all the decisions about color and composition. More often I’m screenshotting blurry videos with pretty young travel influencer in the foreground, and I’m just using the little bit you can see over their shoulder :)

I feel like If you started with Ansel Adams, you might be tempted to be less transformational :)

I admit: working from found reference *can* get a little boring, so you should still paint from real life as often as you possible. Your eyes have a greater range of color than a screen. I think you need a fair bit of real-world experience to get the most out of reference material.

Plus, it’s just more fun to be outside. The natural time limit of moving light and weather make things more exciting. Painting outdoors is a sport. Painting inside is a craft.

Random note: Sometimes the one you hate at the time grows on you.

Initially I felt this cliff was a dud – mostly because it doesn’t have the ‘far horizon’ that I love. But something about the massive cliff right in your face is growing on me.

It’s more abstract! This could become a great painting if executed with plenty of texture.

But I definitely don’t like this one! I don’t want to look at my paintings and see a wall of identical images – (that would be boring) but I *do* love a high horizon, and converging lines moving inward into the space. Whenever I break my own compositional habits I’m less happy with the whole thing. Maybe this one will also grow on me later.

A neat exercise would be to take one photo and do three, five, twelve versions of the same concept. To show yourself how many different ways you can paint the same thing – starting palette, the design, accidents of direct painting – every time you did it, it could be a different painting.

When you work from photos, do whatever you can to be *actually* working from imagination.

Use bad photos; look at them small on your phone; edit the color balance or temperature; change the season in your mind; work fast; work tiny; work huge; paint from black and white; do a line drawing from the photo and paint from your thumbnail – use any tricks you can think of to decrease the domination of the reference and foreground your personal choices.

OK! thanks for listening to all my rambling. I think this mental meandering is half of the reason I do #30x30DirectWatercolor :)

~m