Stories & Process

How I Turn a Photo Reference Into Digital Art in Procreate

For my Navagraha Temple illustration, I drew the linework myself from a photographic reference, chose the colours independently and deliberately developed the piece in a pixelated digital-art style. The complete artwork took around three to four hours.

The full process article looks at how I simplified the architecture and surrounding scene, built the linework manually, approached colour and decided which details to keep rather than trying to reproduce the reference exactly.

Read the full process →

From a place to a digital painting — simplifying what the camera sees

A photograph can record almost everything in front of the lens, but a painting does not have to. When I work digitally from a reference, one of the most useful decisions is choosing what not to reproduce. Architecture, trees, shadows, people and small background details can all compete for attention in a photograph. In a painting, I can decide which of those elements actually carry the scene.

My Navagraha Temple and Lamahatta works are examples of why I enjoy this approach. I begin by looking for the larger structure of the image: the direction of a path or staircase, the rhythm of trees, the silhouette of a building, and the relationship between light and darker areas. Establishing those larger shapes first gives me something more useful than trying to copy isolated details.

Digital tools make experimentation easy, but they also make it tempting to keep adding information. I prefer using them to simplify. A group of leaves can become a mass of colour; distant features can become softer; an architectural edge can be emphasized when it helps the composition. The goal is not to prove that every detail was observed. It is to guide the viewer toward what made me want to draw the scene in the first place.

This is also why recording the process as a timelapse is interesting to me. The finished image shows the final decisions, while the timelapse reveals the sequence of choices underneath it: construction, correction, colour and refinement. Together they show that an artwork is not created in a single moment but through many small visual decisions.

What I look for when building a watercolour study

Watercolour asks for a different kind of decision-making from digital painting. The brightness of the paper is part of the image, transparent washes influence the layers placed over them, and marks cannot always be revised in the same way they can on a digital canvas. That makes planning important, but it also gives watercolour much of its character.

When approaching a study, I find it useful to think first about the main shapes rather than individual details. In a portrait, that means the overall placement of the head, the major light and shadow areas and the relationships between features. In a landscape or architectural subject, it means deciding what leads the eye through the scene before worrying about texture.

I like allowing some areas to remain loose. Not every edge needs the same amount of definition, and not every part of a reference needs equal attention. Transparent colour, visible paper and selective darker marks can suggest more than a fully described surface. The balance between control and unpredictability is one of the reasons I return to the medium.

My watercolour portrait studies and the Forest Stairway piece on this site are part of that continuing practice. I treat studies as a place to observe, experiment and learn rather than expecting every painting to behave like a polished final illustration. Showing those studies alongside finished pieces is important to Speak Through Sketches because they make the learning process visible.

Navagraha Temple — reimagining a photographic reference

For this Navagraha Temple piece, I worked from a photographic reference of the temple entrance and used it as the starting point for a digital interpretation in Procreate.

I drew the linework myself while looking at the reference rather than tracing it. Instead of reproducing every detail, I concentrated on the architecture, steps, entrance and surrounding forms, then deliberately developed the scene in a pixelated style.

I chose the colours myself rather than sampling them directly from the reference. The finished piece took roughly three to four hours and became less about copying a photograph than interpreting the scene through my own choices of line, colour and simplification.

Lamahatta Eco Park — from a quiet photograph to digital art

During a visit to Lamahatta Eco Park, what caught my attention was not a grand viewpoint but a quieter scene: tall trees, simple wooden benches and the open sky appearing between the trunks. I photographed it because the arrangement already felt a little like a painting.

When I returned to the image later, I decided to use it as the starting point for a digital piece. The photograph contained far more information than I wanted in the final artwork, so the process became one of choosing what to keep. I worked with the vertical rhythm of the trees, softened the distant landscape and used the benches to give the scene a sense of scale and stillness.

That is one of the things I enjoy about painting from photographs I have taken myself. The photograph records what was there; the painting lets me decide what the place felt like. The finished Lamahatta study is therefore not intended as a photographic reproduction. It is my visual memory of a small pause during the visit.

Forest stairway — keeping a moment in watercolour

Some photographs are taken because a place is famous. Others are taken because a small detail makes you stop. On one of my outings, a stairway disappearing upward beside trees and foliage became one of those details. I took a quick photograph and moved on, but later the image felt perfectly suited to a sketchbook page.

For the watercolour version I did not try to make every leaf or surface precise. I wanted the staircase to guide the eye through the page while loose greens suggested the vegetation around it. Pen marks helped define the railings and steps, while transparent washes kept the scene lighter than the original photograph.

Painting it afterwards made me notice things I had barely registered while standing there—the change in direction of the steps, the contrast between the constructed path and the vegetation, and the way light collected near the top. It is a good reminder of why I keep taking reference photographs when I travel: sometimes the real observation happens later, at the sketchbook.