Pt. 3- The Nuts and Bolts of Composing a Compelling Reference Photo

Howdy everyone! This is the third in a 3 part series I’ve been offering on how to choose, edit, and prepare a compelling reference photo. If you haven’t watched the other two videos, you can find them here-

Pt 1- Is It Technique That’s Your Problem?

Pt 2- What Makes a Compelling Reference Photo?

Nuts and Bolts-

Now on to the demo video! We had a lot of fun in this video going over reference photos and applying in real time the 5 Basic Rules of Composition. It’s full of lots of very helpful info. The video has 4 basic stages-

1) First, I showed examples of photos I wouldn’t use (and elaborated on why!), and then we went into discussing a few photos that I saw potential in.

2) For these photos, I edited them by applying some of the basics of composition (hunting for contrast, zooming in and cropping, and making sure I had a foreground, middleground, and background).

3) After that, we put them in to the Notanizer app. Here we can produce the rudiments of a notan…

4) …which we then used for the final handmade notans that I painted with india ink.

Of course, folks ask lots of good questions, and we go over lots of little details. Why paint a notan by hand if you can get one produced by an app? How do you use a notan once you’ve made it? etc etc. It’s just the sort of stuff we expand upon in the class, as we drill down and do many examples. The goal is to get you very acquainted with notans, so that you can start using them confidently on your own subjects by the end of class!

Reference Photos-

Try it out on your own! Here are the reference photos I used, and the notans I ended up making. You should be able to paint along with these!