Based on the premise that all paintings should be derived from what can be visually observed at length, this paper explores the use of photographs as a painting aid to the artist. The paper has three main sections. The first section contains historical data, the second contains advantages in using photographic assists, and the third contains personal experiments by the author.
The paper incorporates a brief survey of twenty-five major artists who have worked from photographs with the benefits they obtained from this approach. The artists surveyed were from the seventeenth through the twentieth century.
The second section of the paper outlines various advantages to any contemporary artist working from the photographic media. It also includes information on work techniques.
The last section contains the personal experiments of the author in four categories: painting from published photographs, incorporating photographic transfers into paintings, painting from non-published colored photographs and painting from non-published black and white photographs. The categories are broken into a series of eighteen painting experiments comprised of detailed text and colored illustrations
