Plein-Air Landscape Painting
So I’m gonna work with a number 12 synthetic bristle brush, this is made by Winsor Newton, it’s actually brand new. And the really fun is as you work larger, you wanna gradually scale up the size of your brush. So this 11 by 14 canvass, we’re gonna work with a number 12 brush to establish the undertone. I’m gonna begin to thicken up some of the forms of the trees in here, give them a little bit more visual weight, and pull them forward. As areas become more transparent they actually recede back into the depths of the space. So what from here there’ll be a field, and then it’s like, it’s like sculpting. You can take areas, if you get a little bit big, you can wipe away and change the configuration. Now we’re gonna develop these mountains way off in the distance. And in a second, you’re gonna see me mix up a neutral, very neutral middle value gray. So we have our background with the sky, our foreground and what we’ve done so far is really isolate this middle ground. Let’s just keep developing some of these tree formations. I can come across, sort of scumble that. So standing back, looking at this small panel, just taking some of that neutral green tonality and working right into the mountains. Looking for those secondary shapes, oh, little bit of the blue tint got into my brush which is fine. Now we’re gonna take some of the blue tonalities that we see here in the water, move them down into the foreground to look for ways to vary the grass that moves back into space. And then some of the blue tonalities from the water will also be moved up into the sky in a few places… so. This point we’ve got, we’ve gone from general to specific. We set up the foreground, middle ground, background. Have all those major spots of value and color, sort of like a big porridge. Now we got to add specificity to areas… so few spots poking through. Lot of times you take the brush and start print down real quickly. And we have back coming down here. And as I press down with these little marks, I’m actually carving the contour of the tree. Later on we can always come back on the top, we establish these trees. Coz there’ll be some violets and blue marks within here too. Get down and take a small amount of yellow for that opening, and we’ve got this little shape of yellow popping through between the trees. This is a key junction, comes down. And in the same way we just move the paint around, we can bring the yellow down here to sculpt the trees directly below. At this point in the painting, we’ve really established the basic structure and we’re beginning to develop subtleties within the piece. Now we’ve got to think about temperature. Temperature is a real key element within landscape painting. And right now we’re preeminently have a lot of cool… so with no additional linseed oil, I’m just gonna place a little bit on to this brush. I can take this brush and just start drag it down. Beautiful, that works wonderfully. It creates sort of the imprinting of grass. You can take it and turn it sideways too. And as we do this, we can actually soften these edges back here, sort of pull a little bit of the grey from the mountain down to the water. Then use the brush to sort of bring the violet right on top of the tree to sort of vary the edges of the tree. See by bringing this violet across, it really adds the depth, and then it just works wonderfully this tonal contrast of grey violet against the grey yellow. And then we can take it and bring it, shape some of these hills in the distance… just drag this on top and allow some of what’s underneath to poke through. And that’s the trick, allowing what’s underneath to poke through. Come down here, just pull right into the water a little bit. So this is just, this is like scumbled glaze, and sort of lowers the value. Pushes the mountain back and then there’s still some areas of violet coming through. Then what I’m gonna do is go back to my, the brush I was using for the sky and do like an over paint, so that edge becomes a little bit softer, there we go. I don’t want to be too linear, right there. So it’s that back and forth movement, painting a little bit of the sky and then a little bit of the mountain to get the perfect edge. And then go back, see how some of these bristle mark came on top…