Arcadian Path 4x6
The painting I'm bringing you today is called "Arcadian Path" (4x6). I painted this yesterday and I'm pleased to share some ideas about what I did here in this post today.
Arcadian Path 4x6
I'm working on MDF that's been prepped with house paint. The color is called "Deep Earth" - it's my ideal ground color. After completing the drawing in the morning, I premixed a palette for the painting, went home for lunch and returned to finish the painting in the afternoon. This is a great way to work - having those premixed paints waiting for you creates momentum.
In the members area video, which is a real-time version of this painting session, there is a reference image at the beginning. This reference was initially based on a master's painting. What survived was an interesting tree shape and the backlit quality, and I'm pleased with how it translated here. You want to keep the backlit effect subtle - that's my approach anyway.
You want to get the sky in first: it's behind all the other shapes, so establishing depth in the painting is much easier with that in place. One of the real challenges with landscape painting is how your tree will interact with the sky. I've solved this through my underpainting approach that plans how the painting will proceed. So no real guessing where important elements will be.
After the sky, I work with the darkest areas in the landforms and paint successively until I reach the lightest tones that meet the sky. For the ridge of trees in the background, I made a conscious effort to create atmospheric perspective. Instead of using the same dark paint as the foreground, I mixed my dark paint with some "Mike's gray" (a mixture of Ivory black and titanium white), added a little yellow ochre and other elements to create a more muted tone.
This is important because you want to capture that feeling of air and distance. Reference photos often mislead by portraying background values darker than they should be. I purposefully made the background lighter with "smoky green" - colors with less saturation, less intensity, and less darkness.
The edges where trees interact with the sky are the toughest edges in your painting. There are many different strategies to handle this:
First off, avoid the "smearing thing" - that's the worst strategy ever!
Use what I call the "grabbing technique" where I use bits of the stray hairs at the end of the brush to grab up into the painted sky
Keep the edges of the sky coming up to the tree as you're painting a bit loose and ragged
Mix an intermediate color - combine your tree color with a bit of sky color for transition areas
This last technique is particularly helpful for distant ridges of hills in the background. If your edges aren't working, take the time to use this intermediate color tip - it will help "sell" the effect of atmospheric perspective.
One tip I want to share is to watch out for the "halo effect" around tree edges. As artists, we may tend to create a sort of uniform halo around the entire edge of a tree, which looks amateurish. My solution is to intentionally bring some of the darker colors up to certain areas of the tree edge, breaking up that uniform halo effect.
Hey, here's a crucial tip about the underpainting process: too many tree holes can be a real deal-breaker. Over do it and your tree will look like Swiss cheese. A great solution is to create the overall shape of the tree filled in solidly, then use a swab to carve out a few tree holes. This will yield great results!
One of the greatest artists who brought this intermediate technique to modern landscape painters was Camille Corot. His approach involved successive strokes of varied color from the main tree masses into the sky. I've seen his work in real life at the Louvre in Paris, and you can easily observe how he painted these intermediate strokes to create that feeling of air within trees.
Since Corot's innovation, we take this technique for granted. Even someone great like Constable, who was amazing at drawing and painting trees, wasn't as skilled at capturing that feeling of air as Corot was. That was Corot's main innovation, and all of us landscape painters owe him a debt of gratitude.
BTW, use your reference image as inspiration, not as something to slavishly copy. Don't try to be a human version of a camera that uses oil paint instead of film. The inspiration is critical to creating a successful painting, but you are the final arbiter of what is and isn't art in your process.
The most important thing is to express yourself with paint on your board - that will be 100% unique. No matter how clever or creative something inside the computer is, it's always going to be flatter. There's nothing like using your hand, a brush, real paint on a real board, and creating a real artifact in the real world. This becomes increasingly important as AI creates more digital art.
After reading this post and watching the video, I hope you feel inspired to turn off your computer and sit down to paint. You can't be a painter without making paintings. The sense of worth and value you'll feel afterward is totally worth overcoming any initial resistance. When we actually start working, it always feels amazing - it's one of the best feelings you can have! I'm absolutely addicted to making beautiful paintings and hope to never stop.
It's a compelling reason to develop yourself as a painter and create tangible, physical work that exists in the real world.
Until next time, take good care of yourself and stay out of trouble.
Cheers,
Mike.