Landscape Painting Techniques
With this demonstration, I’m gonna work directly on lapmatcurtain white canvass which has been primed with gesso. Here in my hand I have a number 6 bristled brush which is medium sized, and I’m gonna used some burnt amber and a real transparent form with a lot of linseed oil just to sketch out all of the basic shapes. All of the big shapes and all of the smaller shapes to establish composition. So I’m gonna dip into my pure linseed oil, mix up a small amount of burnt amber right over here. We’re looking at the 8 by 10 inch plenary painting, you can see what I’m saying, the horizon line is way up here. I’ve just indicated a small section of the atmospheric sky up here towards the top third. So in a real loose manner, just come across, indicate where that horizon line’s gonna be. So from here up is the sky, from here down is the fore ground. So at this point, you’re just working right through the areas, and I’ll paint this for a minute. All the elements can be changed at any point you want. Okay, at this point we get a little bit more specific with what we’re looking at. So we got the tops of the bridges that come across, and as I do this, I’m looking at my painting and also my reference. So this comes up slightly. So we have the top form, and the bridge is rather tall, so I’m gonna bring this tonally up. As you can, as you just saw there’s a lot of intricate little doorways and windows and all sorts of curious passageways within this bridge. And this comes down like that right into the water. Well you get a sense of how I’m beginning to map out the relationships of shapes with lights, with darks, with warms, with cools, and it’s like a big stew. And all of these elements sort of like boiling together. And now they got to become something, so at this point, going to work with some earth tones, some oakers, some brown. Gonna mix up some yellow oaker right over here, this some titanium white. Then we have some cools right here, and actually right above this bridge is one shape of cool… I’m gonna mix up some real muted grey blue so we can pull back some of these buildings from a distance and really push the atmospheric sense of perspective. So lot more blue back here, and then, once we get that establish we’ll be should have more of a compelling sense of space. Then we can superimpose marks on top of what we have already. As you can see we have the main frame work of this piece set up, with the lights, darks, warms, cools, and all these like hovering geometric and organic shapes.