Lighting is Everything!

Same painting, different lighting. What a difference! The first one was a cloudy day and the light was pretty poor, the second one was a bright and sunny morning. The second looks more like the original and is a better representation of the painting. I have had to use photoshop to help with cropping and alignment, but I like to keep the images as close to the original as possible so there is very little manipulation of the photo. I see that some artists use photoshop as an extension of their art, which is fine, but I like to use it more as a tool for creating media. Plus, I really do not know much about using photoshop so I would likely mess up the painting if I tried to do anything different! The other part is that I rely on the natural sunlight for my lighting. This is mainly because I do not have the space to house lighting equipment so my system is pretty make-shift. I do have a decent camera with a good lense so I haven't had to invest in any new equipment. I do find that my make-shift system does limit the quality of the images so that means that any prints produced will be smaller to account for the image quality. So that has me thinking of creating a special project to address this...more to come on that in the future! So through this process has been a lot of learning; sketching, painting, supplies, website design, marketing, photography, photoshop....it's been a lot of fun! I think that is what this says about me...I'm a life long learner and crave new information. This has been a fun challenge for me!