How to paint LANDSCAPES with DEPTH - Atmospheric PERSPECTIVE!

hi there how's it going andrew here with another tutorial and this video we're gonna talk about painting landscapes in particular how to create that three-dimensional depth and sense of space within a saint it all has to do with carefully measuring your tones and colors and by having a few little tricks up your sleeve you'll be able to create some dynamic landscapes full of atmosphere let's get started [Music] now I'm really inspired by the landscape here in New Zealand let me show you a few of my photographic references that I'm using as the inspiration for this painting now you'll see as we flick through these photographs that no one single photo is going to be appropriate to make a painting from but there are little bits of detail and information that we can use in a final painting I really like these grassy slopes some of this atmosphere and depth afternoon light that cuts through some clouds and illuminates trees perhaps a river winding its way into the distance or an exposed rocky hillside maybe even a farm building or two but I love these old trees and I think my main subject for this painting has got to be an old pine tree now let's take a close look at the palette of language handmade oil colors that I'll be using for this scene here on my palate I have titanium white burnt umber burnt sienna yellow oxide cadmium yellow cadmium red quinacridone magenta ultramarine blue cobalt teal and phthalo green I'm also using olio gel as my medium now throughout this demonstration I'm gonna be changing up my brushes a little bit but the three main brushes and perhaps my favorite that I've been painting with are these I have a dagger number two bristle brush as well as a trimmed fan brush that has allowed me to create some grassy textures and this little brush here which is a trimmed number zero synthetic ground that will allow me to create some really fine lines and some grass details in the later part of this demonstration now that's enough talking let's get painting I'm working on a homemade Belgian linen panel that's about twelve by fourteen inches the base has been colored with burnt sienna and I've rubbed this back a little bit to reveal some of that linen texture now I'm working directly on this surface with olio gel and a little of language burnt umber this will form some nice and dark lines and form a guide for my composition I'm drawing all of this pretty much freehand and referring to that photographic reference that we talked about earlier once I have the major line to my composition after about 10 to 20 minutes here I can then go about marking in some of my zones of color I'm going to begin with whatever's farthest away and work my way forward towards the foreground my sky goes in pretty quickly and I'm using a number 4 bristle filbert brush I want a little bit of drama here in the sky and so I'm gonna deepen the tone of some of these clouds with ultramarine blue burnt umber and a touch of cobalt teal and just a little bit of quinacridone magenta I'm gonna leave a gap of empty skies showing between these cloud masses and that's going to be predominantly titanium white ultramarine blue and cobalt teal I'm roughly marking in where the highlights of the clouds are going to go and this is predominantly titanium white although I'm avoiding the top of my tonal range as I normally do and I'm growing this out then bringing the same forward with the next year of depth I'm working in the distant Hills now the sun's coming in over the right hand shoulder slightly and so these hills are gonna catch a little bit of light I'm gonna make sure that these forested slopes are gonna be subdued so that they read well from a distance I make sure that if ever I'm mixing green here with that Mystery's if I get a little bit too much yellow coming through in that grain it's gonna come forward too far moving on to the next Hill and you can see here that the shadows have gotten deeper still and now we're starting to establish these tears of depth one in front of the other that deeper color that you see here is a mixture of ultramarine blue and burnt umber with the touch of quinacridone magenta the violet that you can mix by using quinacridone magenta and ultramarine blue really lends itself to atmospheric perspective bringing the slope further forward now I'm using this number 4 filbert bristle brush to communicate a little bit of a grassy slope where we have a paddock meeting that forest on the hillside I need to make sure though that this green grass is not overly saturated because again it'll come too far forward I'm softening between brush marks by a little bit of blending here at this stage to bring some of these tones down into the painting now and start communicating the flat plane that sits below these hills I'm gonna go a little bit darker again and start establishing a little bit more of a tunnel dynamic the depth in these trees is important because we need them to sit in front of those background hills this will only happen if we're more saturated and darker with our shadows I'm now allowing a little bit of phthalo green to come through and you'll notice as I mark in these poplars that they have a little bit more of that chemically green look I'm going to go back and touch up some of these areas in the next pass of the painting but this phthalo green is really gonna help achieve a little bit of saturation as we bring the scene forward and for these grassy slopes along what I hope is gonna be a riverbank this needs to be a little bit more intense so it reads well here at a more immediate distance our major pine tree is going in now and this is ultramarine blue and burnt umber and you can see there's a bit of phthalo green coming here too now we've got to be careful for phthalo because this is going to be a bully and by that I mean it's gonna go around and knock the crap out of the other colors that are on your palette so be wary and use it very sparingly a little bit goes a long way now let's establish this Bank here just sitting in front of the tree I'm using a series of fragmented brush marks I want this to same like clumps and tussocks of grass I'm gonna bring it down to meet the water's edge but where there's water here in the foreground I'm gonna want to just communicate a little bit of a reflection this is where whatever's happening above that water line is then drugged down through into the body of water I'm gonna come back and re-establish some of these marks make it a little bit more defined later on the process now you can see here just how quickly an image can come together by using the system of working with whatever's farthest away and bringing this Seine forward towards the viewer now I'm using pretty much a number four brush throughout this entire demonstration and this is allowing me to cover a large amount of ground up very quickly now normally I'm using really quite big brushes but because this is such a little painting the number four bristle filbert is really helping me cover that area now in places I'm gonna want to fragment some of these areas to just allow them to communicate a little bit more texture and maybe a little bit more detail now for this my trusty number 2 dagger really comes into its own this pine tree is going to be catching light and all sorts of places where this intricate detail of clumps of pine needles occur along the right-hand edge catching that Sun one of the things I really loved about these pine trees is their character how some parts of the tree are kind of dead or dying but they end up with this fragment sort of open canopy and form a really cool pattern it also makes this tree look really old and I think might help tell some sort of story with this painting over here on the right hand side I think I want one of these weeping willows to just cling to the riverbank my block in is now finished it's been two days between these passes because I'm using olio gel it's gonna take about four days all up to cure so at the two day mark it's formed a little bit of a tack or stickiness which is accepting the next layer of brush work quite well now I'll be able to move and manipulate some of that underlying pigment somewhat but I like leaving it maybe two days to just have a little bit of give to that underlying layer it also means that as I'm adding these brush marks over the top I'm not gonna lift up that underlying layer of the block in I'm going directly over whatever I'd blocked in before with the sky here and just cleaning up some of my marks and some of the tones I can also add to the top tonal range of some of these cloud highlights for instance by using titanium white a little bit of burnt umber and a little bit of yellow oxide this achieves a nice warm tone for those cloud highlights catching the afternoon Sun it's amazing how versatile these number 2 dagger brushes are I'm using the broad side of the brush to blend my marks and then occasionally flicking it with just the ends of the bristles this allows to break and blend some of these areas in the clouds and then again as we did with the block in bringing these techniques downwards and towards the viewer following those tears of depth as they come forward to achieve atmospheric perspective our deep shadowed hills need to be slightly blue to violet in order for them to read at a fast distance this communicates the sheer volume of atmosphere between the viewer and those hills I want a little bit of erosion or a rocky surface exposed on that main Bluff this is mapped out with a bit of titanium white and a touch of burnt umber to achieve a little bit more of a warmer gray but here my relationships of Blues and Gray's it's pretty subtle from one color to the next we can overdo things at this vast distance now I'd consider these passes that I'm making now to be final detail normally I'm working with blocking and modeling and detail as three major parts of the painting process but here I've combined my blocking in and modeling as one pass so I should be finished with this painting as it's coming forward here with the past that you're saying now when we get right up on the painting you can see the types of marks that I'm making every time I deposit paint from the brush I go back and I rework those edges I make sure I have no distracting ridge lines and I make sure that that marks sits really nicely within the space and relates to everything else around it I'm always checking that everything is operating as it should you have just the ends of the bristles are flicking that surface and I'm creating a nice fragmented zone here to communicate those distant trees I bring my edges together and whilst this surface is still wet I can manipulate those tones a little bit I leave gaps between my brush marks in case I want to go back in there and deposit paint between those marks here I'm using that technique to just change the tone and the hue just slightly and have a little bit more cobalt teal coming through and in amongst the ultramarine blue and quinacridone magenta I've left a gap between those distant hills to achieve a little bit of a highlight which I'm adding now I found that a little bit too much yellow was coming through my highlight from before and I needed to blue this out so again cobalt teal can help me achieve a really nice blue green this is gonna help these hills register at more of a distance away from the viewer with some minor adjustments this section is just about finished now pay no attention to the horses that you see here in the mid ground they aren't gonna make it I'm sorry we're just gonna have to imagine some horses up there on those grassy slopes just at the edge of the forest again I'm able to work in some of that color that's underlined to just communicate some of these pastoral colors here are meeting the hillside I want a little bit more softness in this zone and one of the things I really like about this scene is that contrast of textures if I avoid going to dark with my shadows and then this area too will recede into space nicely plenty of wet pint out means that I can blend one area in with another and this is just helping soften this area overall and also helping to push it back into the painting now let's paint some trees and one of my favorite things about painting landscapes is this illusion of detail that you can create when there's really not much there at all and you'll be surprised that I use this dagger number two to communicate a bit of that detail when most people would think I'm using a very small triple zero sable round for instance here we can communicate the edges of trees that are catching that light just along that right-hand edge and the fragment that's lined to communicate those individual leaves catching the Sun so here at this kind of distance we want to give the illusion of detail the impression that something's there without overstating it I've allowed a little bit more intensity to come through in these colors now and it's the relationship between these colors that is creating this illusion of depth so having a little more warmth and a touch more yellow come through now it's helping these creep forward a little bit closer as an artist you can do just about anything you can even make grass eat horses now I must admit I didn't do a compositional sketch or a study before I did this little painting so one of the things that I discovered through the modeling stage is that the horses were a little bit too much it became a little bit confusing because I wanted more attention to be given to the tree and that little cabin in the distance rather than on these animals in the foreground so there's only so many focal points that we can focus on within any given painting that if we put too much in it can really water down the overall message here I think just having a lone pine on the bank of the river is enough and will give enough of that pastoral characteristic that I wanted to see in this New Zealand scene now with my willow on the right hand side I'm going to deepen the tones and again you can notice now how dark the shadows are in comparison with whatever's in the background I've allowed a bit of phthalo green to come through here in conjunction with my ultramarine blue and burnt umber and I'm brushing this again with a number 2 dagger as a general rule of thumb once I've established all of my shadow notes after the blocking and a modeling I'll go back and add crisp highlights here I'm using just the point of the dagger brush to manipulate these lighter tones again I'm using titanium white and cadmium yellow here predominantly with just a touch of ultramarine blue now the big lone pine is gonna need a very different kind of technique these marks are gonna be shorter and sharper but the dagger number 2 brush can do a very good job of this and fragment that lead edge I'm trying to communicate those individual clumps of pine needles so it's just a question of going slowly and surely around that tree being diligent to cover up as much of that block in layers I can only allowing a hint of it to come through you can see this brush really lends itself well to this kind of technique because as I composite the paint I can drag it up in the direction that the pine needles would go it really starts to take on that character that I'm looking for a little while I can go back with some of this high light color but because of the nature of these pine needles it's only gonna catch so much light so this color needs to be a little bit more subdued than the highlights I was using for my other trees and a little bit more saturated so that it comes forward still so here I'm using phthalo green cadmium yellow but I need to warm that green up a little bit so I'm using just a touch of cadmium red as well I'm always paying attention to my edges so when I have the opportunity I go back and rework the edge of the tree to make sure it blends into the overall scene otherwise we can have a bit of a jarring shape over a field we don't want that we want it to sit naturally within the overall picture now with a very fine synthetic ground brush I'm gonna just kick in a few highlights where these exposed branches in the trunk are gonna be catching the Sun our scene is really shaping up and we need just a bit more of this grassy texture along the riverbank I'm using two different brushes for this a trimmed fan brush to drag out individual strands of grass along with my number two dagger to just drag that paint downwards into the water to form a little bit of a reflection I'm always saving my highlights and my brightest brights for the very end so we've got a little ways to go from here still now for the very immediate foreground here on the right hand side this is where the deepest and darkest shadows are gonna go and again following this rule of muted subdued tone in the background and a greater variation of tones in the foreground this will help atmospheric perspective in that illusion of three-dimensional space so the colors that you see here on the right hand side are very dark indeed a combination of ultramarine blue and burnt umber if I need to go even darker a really nice combination to try is phthalo green burnt umber and quinacridone magenta that combination of those three colors will go even darker than my normal burnt umber ultramarine blue so once I've established the dark shadows I'm gonna then go in and lay in the highlights of these blades of grass that have been exposed to the sunlight and get some nice crispy detail here in the immediate foreground there's no real quick way to do this but with a synthetic round again like I was using for the highlights on the tree I can draw in individual blades in grass here and there now it is possible to go overboard with this technique and this is probably a little bit more detailed than I'd like to go normally but I'm just putting a few blades of grass here and there strategically it'll give the illusion that there's detail where there's really not much going on at all now I'm alternating these highlight colors I'm not just sticking to one color for the highlight in some areas it's gonna be a little bit more yellow some more titanium white and cadmium yellow is gonna come through and then in other areas I'm gonna allow it to get a little bit cooler and bluer which that will be titanium white and ultramarine blue now here with the water along the riverbanks we're gonna want a little bit of a sparkle where some exposed stones might just enter the water here this will lift this area and also bring it forward also just dragging through the wet paint with the touch of ultramarine blue and titanium white will give the impression that this water here in the foreground is moving and with these final little details my painting of this New Zealand pastoral scene is finished overall I'm pretty happy with this there's a few things that I'd change if I had to go back and paint it again but I'm happy with the way that tree is sitting in the composition and the depth and the same well I really hope you've enjoyed this video tutorial and if you did then please hit that like button for me and if you want to see more videos just like this one then make sure you're subscribed to this channel as always you can find me on Instagram and Facebook but also make sure you're subscribed through my website for bonus content at WWE Andrew Tischler comm I look forward to seeing you again soon so long

Channel: Andrew Tischler

Views: 849,614

Rating: 4.964087 out of 5

Keywords: landscape, landscape painting, art, painting, how to paint, how to paint landscapes, landscape painting tutorial, how to paint in oils, oil painting, painiting in oils, depth, painting depth, painting tutorial

Id: 34V7VFOX7ow

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017