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 […]
Painting Fall Foliage
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 […]
Drawing and Painting Foliage- Value Maps and Squinting
John Constable, one of England’s and the world’s most revered landscape painters, spent his career making drawings and painted studies from which he then worked up his famous “six footers”. Constable’s work was enormously influential in France with the Barbizon school of landscape painters, and eventually the Impressionists. Here is a typical drawing of his […]
The Poet of the Forest
Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898) was a late nineteenth century Russian landscape painter. He is revered in Russia and has steadily become better known in the West. Shishkin received a classical painting education in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and also was the recipient of Imperial scholarships for study abroad. He was a contemporary of Isaac Levitan (my […]
Lessons From a Walk
Last summer, while out for my usual early morning walk, I noticed this big foliage mass of a tree which hangs over our road. The thing that struck me about it was that it perfectly demonstrated a couple of points that come up when painting trees, and really anything in Nature. I took a picture […]