Hereunder are some suggestions on turning photos into oil painting.

• Lighten up the darks, and darken the light

  Digital photos tend to have very dark and flat shadows. At the same time, the lights can get so brilliant that they look flat and uninteresting. The tonal relationship is often overly exaggerated. As an artist, you need to know how to interpret what you see and fill in the things you can't see in the pictures.

• Don't paint the shadows black even if that is what it looks like in the photo

  Avoid creating “dead holes” by making the shadow lighter and more transparent with other colors or color mixtures. No blacks or dark browns.

  If the lighting source is warm, paint your shadow using cool colors such violet, blue or green. If the lighting source is cool, then you may need to warm up the shadow a bit by adding some warmth to the shadows. Experiment to see what works for a given subject.

• Let the photo work as a guide for drawing and a general value relationship, but alter the colors for best effect

  Like I said earlier, colors in photos are never as brilliant and vivid as your eyes would observe. I am often disappointed by the way colors come out in photos. This is where artistic license comes into play.

  For example, if you see a flat red color, you can use an interesting hot red orange color.

  If you see a vast patch of green with same intensity, why not vary the greens by adding blue, violet, orange, or yellow in different spots. Use your imagination and experiment.

  It is also a good idea to alter the colors to your liking with an image editing software such as Photoshop or a free image editing program like GIMP.

• Crop photos as needed

  Don't copy an entire photograph. Instead, determine your canvas format first, then use a viewfinder to crop the section to make it more interesting.

• Unify different elements from various pictures to make it coherent

  If you combine several photographs to make a painting, it can be challenging, because there are many things to consider.

  You do not (usually) want your painting to look like a collage where the pieces do not fit together. So, watch out for direction of lighting, color temperature, value relationships, and relative scale. You'll have to modify your painted image from your reference photos to make everything coherent.                      

Hope the above tips will be helpful for you while you are painting according to photos. Wish you turn your photos into a beautiful oil painting.

Romandy Art Website: www.oilpaintingcentre.com