Are you dreaming of warm sun on your face and soft breezes carrying the scent of wild flowers or sea spray?
Well, if you’re like many of us, old man winter has wrapped you in a blanket of snowy white.
Even if you can’t book the next flight south, you can get away from the drifts for a few hours while you paint a warm and inviting summer landscape.
Get out your paints and brushes, compile a bunch of cheery landscape reference pictures and create a summer getaway right there in your studio.
What Should I Include In My Landscape?
A landscape can be a forest, mountains, a meadow, a lake or all of these combined. You need to decide what you want to include in your landscape. Figure out what part of a scene interests you.
Something caused you to take a second look at that particular photo. Was the sky a magnificent mass of clouds and colors? Did the trees form a lacy canopy in the background? Does the meadow look like it would be a perfect place to have a picnic?
Even a simple landscape should make a statement. There is a subject there and you need to develop it for your audience. Enhance your subject with elements that add to the statement and remove segments that undermine your composition.
Make several sketches of your composition to determine what best conveys your message. Remember, you’re working from reference materials and you can intertwine them any way you wish. There’s probably a number of good compositions hiding in there. Maybe you’ll make a series of several different configurations of the same components.
Experiment with different groups of details, points of view and focal points. Selecting only the most important elements and keeping your composition simple is important for a successful landscape.
Don’t limit yourself to just a few reference photos. Try different combinations of reference pictures or components of a photo until you have a strong composition that tells your story.
Look For Interesting Shapes
Stay away from boring shapes. Symmetry is almost unheard of in nature, so forget perfect squares, circles and triangles. If you’re using multiples of a similar shape, mix up the size, point of view and local color.
Feel free to pick interesting shapes out from several reference photos. The photos themselves may be boring, but putting together components from several shots can help you compose a dynamic, interesting scene.
Consider your composition as an abstract of shapes and patterns instead of specific components. Whether your composition is mountains, forests and valleys or a flower vase, draped cloth and fruit, the compositional idea is the same. The viewer should be interested in what he sees and is guided through the painting to understand your story.
Direct Your Audience With Action Lines
Action lines guide your viewers through your painting. Directional lines indicate movement and direct the viewer’s attention around the space you’ve created.
Action lines can echo each other or conflict with each other. You don’t want the viewer’s attention to run off the edge or stop when you want it to proceed around the composition. Don’t form action lines that direct motion to the corners of the painting.
While you’re still in your compositional stage, sketch in lines to indicate how you want your audience to move through the painting. Using those marks a guide, develop lines that lead to the center of interest.
The center of the painting is exactly where you don’t want to place your center of interest. Keeping things off-center forces your eye to look around for the most important component of your composition.
Action lines can be a path or road, a stream, the contour of a mountain or the tree line of a forest. It can also be shadows, a change in color value or hue. Hard edges tend to stop the eye while soft edges allow the eye to continue to move across the scene.
There are many ways to create action lines and using a combination of devices keeps the painting lively.
Divide Space
Once again, asymmetry rules when determining the division of space in your composition. Don’t place your horizon line squarely in the middle. Set in the lower half of the support, the sky area becomes more dominant. If your horizon line lies above the half-way mark, the scene maintains dominance.
Don’t visually divide your support in half vertically. A vertical object like a tree or a telephone pole set squarely in the center just looks awkward. Avoid diagonal lines that intersect the corners. It sends the viewer’s eye along the path and right out of the scene.
Create A Focal Point
Even a landscape need a center of interest. It’s not just a bunch of trees behind a meadow or field of flowers intersected by a stream or path. Make the meadow the focal point with strong colors, divisions and detail or allow the stream to lead your audience to an interesting finale.
Use devices like animals, figures, buildings or vehicles to add interest or scale. Other devices include patches of saturated color, repeating patterns or a stark contrast in values and hard edges.
Just remember that your focal point should reinforce your main theme. Keep things simple and avoid too much busyness that would detract from your viewer’s attention.
