I've always struggled with my landscape paintings as I want to put too much detail into them. But now I've started taking two sets of reference photos. The first set is taken properly, and the other I set my camera so the photos will be blurry, out of focus (it's easy to do if your camera's got a manual focus option). I print out big versions of the fuzzy set and use this for my landscape paintings. That way I can't see too much detail, just the main colors and shapes. But by having the other set I can, if I really, really need to, see more detail in a part of the landscape (though I try to resist looking at these photos at all).
Tip from: Agatha.
Another trick -- for those of us who wear glasses -- is to take your glasses off! I find everything goes nicely out of focus!
Tip from: Katherine.
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