It may be hard to imagine right now, but soon it will be that time of year– when we are all tempted by the bright colors of fall foliage to throw every high chroma color we can lay our hands on onto a canvas! In many ways, painting this season can be even more daunting […]
The Vault of the Sky
What shape is the sky? As landscape painters we must remember that the sky is not a flat plane in the distance, but a vault which arches up toward and over the viewer’s head. The fact that we are depicting a vault rather than a flat plane affects the perspective we see in the clouds, […]
Water: Color in Reflections
Painting water is an endlessly challenging subject. In addition to understanding the visual science of how we perceive reflections, as artists we also need to think about how to best depict those perceptions in color! Here are a few helpful color notes to think about when painting reflections: ~the depth of the water (the deeper […]
Let it Snow!
Many of us are facing bitter winter weather just now. So, it seemed an appropriate time to talk about…painting snow! Two of the main concepts to keep in mind when painting snow are value and color temperature. When painting a light, highly reflective surface like snow we are hampered by the value limitations of our […]
When to Paint the Sky
“It is much easier to paint a sky to suit a landscape than a landscape to suit a sky.” Sir Alfred East, The Art of Landscape Painting in Oil Colour (1915). When should you paint the sky? Should it be the first thing you paint when you begin a landscape painting? The last? All at once? […]
Seeing in Shapes
Learning to see the large shapes in Nature as opposed to all the little details is an essential skill in painting and particularly in landscape painting where Nature presents us with, as John Carlson calls it, “an overloaded property room”. Unless we are able to reduce the visual clutter we see to big simple shapes, […]