It’s spring, soon to be summer, and one of the best ways to get a strong start on your landscape paintings is to simplify your palette. Mixing beautiful naturalistic greens can be challenging. Here’s a short video on mixing naturalistic greens to show you how! P.S. If you’d like to know more about how to […]
Premix Your Palette
One of the many concepts, techniques and strategies I teach is premixing your palette, whether working in the studio or in the field. I often encounter resistance to this idea, but more often than not, once students try it, they understand and appreciate the advantage it gives them. Why is premixing helpful? Premixing requires the […]
Drawing As Exploration
In a previous post Why Draw? I discussed all the practical ways in which drawing can make you a better landscape painter—encouraging editing and design of elements in your scene, sensitivity to perspective and other drawing issues of scale and proportion, and as a means of simplification. And while these things are reason enough to […]
Gradation
Painting students are often encouraged to think of Nature in terms of shapes of color and value. That is a useful idea because it helps to build a solid foundation of design, value structure and drawing into our paintings. But, what to do after our flat color shapes are in place and we wish to […]
Learn to Key Your Landscape
Landscape painters need to have a good understanding of the importance of value in successfully depicting the landscape on a two dimensional surface. In order to have our painting ‘read’, that is to show the planes of the landscape as well as its depth, atmosphere and scale, proper values are essential. As we’ve previously written, […]
Notan–Not Just Black and White
Notan is a Japanese word for light-dark and consists of a two value arrangement of shapes. It can be used as a tool to define and simplify shape and value patterns. So it may seem counterintuitive to say that Notan is not about light and dark. But it’s true. Notan is an exercise in simplification and […]