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Here are some tips to help you with your next landscape painting.
Landscape Painting Tip No 1:
Don't Put Everything In
You're not obliged to include everything
that you see in the landscape you're painting simply because it is there
in real life. (In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if you do this,
then you might as well take a photo and have it printed on canvas.) Be
selective, include the strong elements that characterise that particular
landscape. Use the landscape as a reference, to provide you with the
information you need to paint the elements, but don't slavishly follow
it.
Landscape Painting Tip No 2:
Use Your Imagination
If it makes for a stronger painting
composition, don't hesitate to rearrange the elements in the landscape.
Or take things from different landscapes and put them together in one
painting. (Obviously this doesn't apply if you're painting a famous,
readily identifiable scene, but the majority of landscape paintings are
not of postcard scenes, but rather to capture the essence of a
landscape.)
Landscape Painting Tip No 3:
Give the Foreground Preference
Don't paint the whole landscape to
the same degree of detail: paint less detail in the background of the
landscape than you do in the foreground. It's less important there and
gives more 'authority' to what's in the foreground. The difference in
detail also helps draw the viewer's eye into the main focus of the
landscape painting.
Landscape Painting Tip No 4:
It's Not Cheating to Buy Green Paints
You're not 'cheating' if
you buy green paints in a tube rather than mixing your own. One of the
main benefits of doing this is that it means you always have instant
access to particular greens. But don't limit yourself; extend the range
of 'ready-made' greens by adding blue or yellow to it.
Landscape Painting Tip No 5:
Get to Know How to Mix Greens
To
quote Picasso: "They'll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese
green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you
like; but that particular green, never." The variety and intensity
of greens that occur in nature is quite awesome. When mixing a green,
use the fact that green have either a blue or a yellow bias as the
starting point in determining the proportions you mix. (But remember the
shade of green something is in a landscape does change depending on the
time of day and what was a bluish green this morning may well be a
yellowish green this evening.)
Each different blue/yellow combination will give
a different green, plus the variations from the proportions of each you
mix. With practise it becomes instinctive to mix the shade of green
you're after. Take an afternoon to practise mixing your own greens,
making a colour chart to record which paints gave you what results. Also
experiment mixing with two blues and two yellows; and mixing blue or
yellow to a 'ready-made' green.
Landscape Painting Tip No 6:
Instant Muted Greens
Mix a little black with various yellows and
you’ll see that it produces a range of muted (or ‘dirty’) greens and
khakis. (Remember to add the black to the yellow, not yellow to black;
you need mix in only a little black paint to darken a yellow, but it
will take a comparatively large amount of yellow paint to lighten a
black.)
Landscape Painting Tip No 7:
Do a Series
Don't think that because you've painted a particular
landscape once, you're now done with it. Be like the Impressionist
Claude Monet and paint it again and again, in different lights, seasons,
and moods. You won't get bored with the scene, but instead you start to
see more in it. For example, the way a tree's shadow tracks around it
through the day, and how the different the light of the harsh midday sun
is to that of sunrise and sunset. For further inspiration for painting
the same scene again, take a look at the photos of landscape artist
Andy Goldsworthy
of a particular scene taken through a range of light conditions and
seasons.
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