I love painting landscapes and I’ve made a small sketchbook dedicated to painting landscape studies. This sketchbook is folded from a A3 size BaoHong 300gsm watercolor paper and measured about 18x10cm.

Mapcrunch is the site that I used as the source of reference images for these landscape studies. A simple click on the Go button will teleport you to a random Google street view image. You can then browse around, zoom in and out like you are using the Google Map. The site also has options of restricting the search to specific continents and countries; and urban and indoor scenes.

Different from just using a single photo as reference, the ability to explore and navigate the location 360 degree on the Google map gives you a lot more information about the location, and allows you to choose you own perspectives to paint like you are actually at the location.

One thing that needed to pay attention is, sometimes the image shown is copyrighted – those are the photos uploaded by individual contributors to Google. The copyright information is on the lower right corner of the page, make sure you avoid those copyrighted image and only use the image by Google.

The following are a few landscape studies I did over a few art streams on YouTube. If you’ve missed my weekly streams, you can watch them here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc6kMdy4a6DNZc7ZY9xiedxu9jqZQjA99