Crop the photo for our watercolor painting

In the reference photo I was most attracted by the light in the distance and the reflections on the water. The tall Venetian buildings on their narrow canals make for wonderful light and reflection effects. So my first step was to crop the photo this way and paint this new cropped image.

As I wanted to concentrate on this I used my photo editor, ACDSee Pro, to crop the image as in Fig 2 below. Now the reflections and distant light are more prominent as intended.

Drawing of narrow Venetian Canal

One I crop the photo the drawing is done lightly with attention given to perspective. When drawing a scene like this you have to drawing everything from a particular eye level. As the photograph was taken from another bridge I decided to retain eye level as was in my original image. The importance of eye level is that when drawing a scene with correct perspective, items above eye level appear to come down to eye level, the further away they are from the viewer. Items below eye level appear to come up to eye level, as they move further away from the viewer.

When I draw any street or canal scene I usually start by drawing a very light horizontal line at eye level.

Continue to: Venice Canal Watercolor Painting Under Wash – Step 3