4 of my favorite landscape painting tricks
Hacks for creating depth in a painting of a place
Give me a landscape painting any day. A moon lighting up over a body of water, the silhouette of a tree animating a sky, a seascape alive with waves. Maybe it is because I always feel like I wish I was on a road trip, but I like traveling through space.
Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint Paul Hospital, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889
Anybody, no matter their experience or confidence level, can paint a horizon line, a hill, a bird, a sun. And if they can paint a horizon line, bird and sun they can do a landscape. So I always make sure to include a class about landscape painting early in the class.
If the primary of goal of the landscape painter is to make the viewer travel far back into the painting, and experience the foreground, middle ground and background, there are a number of hacks that help a new painter create that depth. And the earlier I get these tricks and tips into the hands of new painters, the quicker it is that a new painter understands that painting is not all secretive Renaissance-era techniques and skills that require years to master, the more likely they are to succeed.
Here I have pulled a few Grant Wood paintings to pair with some simple line drawings I did in order to illustrate these four landscape painting hacks I always share with my class.
Trick 1: Move from warm to cool or cool to warm. Or move lighter to darker or darker to lighter. This mirrors how we really see the value of the land traveling away from us.
Grant Wood, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931
Trick 2: Put large objects into the front of the painting and smaller objects in the back, just like our eyes naturally see objects.
Grant Wood, Spring in the Country, 1941
Trick 3: Create zig zagging lines
Grant Wood, Young Corn, 1931
Trick 4: A narrowing path or road mirrors how we see paths traveling back in time in the real world and creates more depth.
Grant Wood, Stone City, 1930
Who Needs a Muse? Here is where we think of something for you to paint…
What is a special place for you? The lake where your grandparents’ lake cabin stands? A rainforest in your home land or a beach in the Middle East? A street in Athens leading to a restaurant where you had an amazing encounter or a road near your college where your car hit a deer. Sketch out that place the way it is or the way you remember it (I often head to Google maps or Shutterfly to refresh my memory of special places). Then think of how you might slightly alter that space to travel back further in time. Could you put a cafe table with a glass of retsina as your large object in the front? The wounded deer a small speck at the end of your road is your tiny object helping us travel in the back? Or could you create a painting where all the light values are in the front and the darkest values in the back? Add a zig zag or bushes where there wasn’t really one.