Tips for Painting Landscapes

Have you ever seen a spectacular landscape and instantly felt your fingers itch to capture its spirit on canvas, to be able to paint a landscape that evokes emotions in an individual viewing it that are as intense as the real landscape evoked in you?

If yes, find some tips below that will help you capture such a landscape on canvas that is able to evoke captivating emotions as the real one.

Don’t put everything in

It’s not a must that you must include each and every object you see in the landscape painting just because it is there in the real-life (in fact, if you did this, you could as well just print out a photo of the landscape on canvas).

Just be selective and include the strong elements that are characteristic of that given landscape. The landscape should only be used as reference to provide you with the necessary information to paint the elements, but don’t slavishly follow everything.

Put your imagination to use

Go ahead and re-arrange the elements of the landscape if it will make for a stronger composition of the landscape painting. You can also get things from different landscapes and include them in a single painting (Of course this cannot work if the landscape you’re painting is a famous, easily identifiable scene. But most landscape paintings are not for postcard scenes but simply to capture the essence of the landscape).

The foreground should take high priority

Your whole landscape should not be of the same degree of detail. The foreground should include more detail than the background. It’s not important to paint the background with a lot of detail because it’s less important there. More detail in the foreground give more authority to what is there. Also, the viewer’s attention will be drawn onto the main focus of the landscape painting due to the difference in detail.

Buy green paints

You can buy green paints in a tube and the benefits of doing this are that you will always have instant and different green colors available whenever you need them.

However, you should not limit yourself and can extend the range by mixing your own shades of green by mixing or adding yellow and blue to them.

Learn how to mix green colors

There is a wide variety and intensity of green colors available in nature. The first thing to remember when mixing greens is that they have a yellow or blue bias at the beginning.

You should note this and determine the proportions that you should use. The colors in a natural landscape may change naturally to look more yellowish or bluish depending on the time of the time of day and it is a good idea to experiment with two shades of blue or yellow.

Instant soft greens

When you mix black with a variety of yellows, this reduces the mid range, and makes the greens look more like khaki. The point to remember is that you add black color to yellow and not yellow color to black as all you will require is a little black paint to darken the yellow. On the other hand, it would take a large amount of yellow to brighten a black.

Do a series of landscapes

After you have painted one landscape and are satisfied with it, do not limit yourself. Again, you can paint the landscape repeatedly and have a variety of landscapes related to the original one. This way, you will begin seeing the scene from different perspectives.

For example, the shadows may look different at different times of the day and you may have different outlooks of the sunrise and sunset. You can also grab the scene in different seasons and weather conditions.