I wanted to photograph the structure in the landscape, in the place that I pictured the structure in the landscape in my next painting.
Placing the sculpture in the right place and taking the photo from the right angle is surprisingly difficult. These are some failed attempts:
I wanted the sculpture to allign with the centre of the gap in the trees, because I always thought it seems like a natural dome shape. But alligning the sculpture and the camera to get this right took a lot of trial and error!
These are the photos I got that I am happy with:
I had an idea when I was out photographing the structure to photoshop the images so that the legs sit behind things in the landscape, to make the shot look more believable. I used the stamp tool on Affinity Photo to do this and it works so well! It’s mad how erasing one leg makes such a difference to the depth of the structure:
I can look so odd when some of the legs are put behind the bushes and some are not. 
I removed too much of the legs of the structure here, it looks too flat.
This removing of parts of the legs is very similar to the process I go through when I’m painting. The bushes in the middle of the structure are very similar to the paint brush marks that sit in the centre of the structure.
I used a normal lens for this instead of the wide angle lens. I makes the sculpture look much larger and magnificent, and more accurate to what one would see with their own eyes. But the blur of the sculpture makes the image look less believable. 
I made the top tree branches sit underneath the structure, to make the height of the structure look believable.
The structure looks so grand and vast in these photoshopped images. It’s crazy to think in reality this sculpture is this size:
This process is very helpful for transferring what is in my imagination onto paper. It helps the next stage of the process: designing where the structure should sit in the painting.
When I painting I also imagined a structure here, because I could see a corridor or trees going into the distance. The structure that I imagined wasn’t the same as the sculpture though.. perhaps I could design my next sculpture to fit more with what I imagine in the woods!? To actually fit a certain spot say.
Anyway I tried photoshopping the structure into this space, it kinda works, but not so well as this structure in the first spot.
Next on to a blog post on the painting!
Georgina Harris 
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