With all my paintings of lakes in recent days, I’m feeling a little waterlogged, so I thought I’d expand my painting horizons and try to paint a forest scene (“branching out” as it were). As a reference, I used one of my photos of the path that links Lac Monroe to the Chutes du Diable up at Mont Tremblant National Park

Far from being a “walk in the park” (sorry – had to!), this painting went through a LOT of reconstructive surgery. Stepping back to take in my finished piece, it became obvious to me that I had hewn too closely to my photo reference. The end result was a painting with values that worked against me, making the trees off in the distance appear to be on the same level as the trees that were in the foreground.

To test this theory, I brought my painting into Photoshop and used Image > Adjustments to switch it to Black & White. The results are below:

Notice how the space feels very shallow, with an awkward push and pull between the foreground and background elements? Clearly, this needed a serious overhaul!

The first thing I did was tinker with the black and white version of my painting until the values held together in a way that made sense and created a feelinge of depth.

The next step was to adjust the coloured version of the painting in Photoshop so that when converted to black and white, the colours translated to the new values (or at least, resembled them as close as possible).

Once I know what I was aiming for, I repainted the areas that needed repainting. Sometimes, I could get away with a light glaze, but other times, a complete repainting of certain areas was required.

Not gonna lie – this exercise in tinkering with values took much longer and was far more difficult than I had imagined it would be. I took countless progress photos and brought them into Photoshop so that I could compare the values, and not matter what, I always seemed to be slightly off the mark. Worse yet, the original brush marks in the first version of the painting disappeared the more adjustments I made, and I found myself missing that original, imperfect painting.

In fact, I’m not completed convinced that this painting is well and truly done as I’m sure that certain areas could use some improvement (in other words, I’m not “out of the woods yet!” – okay, that’s the last pun, I promise!!). But for now, I’m happy to move on to other things!