Sylvia is an award-winning artist specializing in representational painting including still lifes, landscapes, and figurative works. Working alla prima from life is her preferred way of working. Strong composition, lively colors, and emphasis on solid drawing form a foundation of her painting, teaching style and philosophy.

Often an artist can hire models with interesting costumes to paint, but seldom do they come with period or interesting backgrounds. This program shows you how you can take photographs of interiors that you may have collected over the years and use them to provide interesting backdrops for the figures that you hire in your studio.

To that end, the artist paints the figure in this composition from life in the studio, and on a subsequent day, adds all the background interest from a photograph taken years prior. We think that this exercise is one of the best we have seen for showing how to eliminate the detail, and focus on the essential elements in the photo, to add depth and context to the painting of the model.