8 First steps towards Mastering the art of Landscape Painting

By: kath

Nature has a way of soothing people and making them connect with their inner selves. Perhaps that is why landscape paintings are so popular. Beautiful flowers, trees, mountains, rivers, deserts and greenery all over – nature’s wonders are the best muse an artist can get to be inspired.

However capturing the beauty of an entire landscape in a painting is not a joke. Here are some tips for a beginner to create a beautiful landscape painting:

1. Sketch first

As a beginner, it is best that you first draw a well-defined sketch and then proceed to paint. Making sketches is the best way to hone your skills.

2. Observation

In fact, it is advisable that before sketching or painting you study some landscape paintings closely. Now it won’t be possible to visit art galleries daily in order to study paintings. Hence, you can browse online art galleries and study the landscape paintings online for hours from the comfort of your home. You can also buy a landscape painting from any such fine art gallery and hang it a room. This way you can study and analyse the landscape painting at your own pace.

3. Don’t stuff the painting with everything

It is not necessary to paint everything you see in a landscape. In fact you can’t paint everything that Nature offers in just one landscape painting. It is not important to capture each and every bug, leaf or tree. If you try to paint everything, you would only make the painting look cluttered. Instead try and focus on the most powerful elements in a landscape and emphasise on them only.

4. Use your imagination

There is no harm in rearranging the elements in the landscape if it makes your painting prettier. You can make the trees greener or increase the intensity of the glorious sun or you can even change the daylight into evening time with appropriate colours.

5. Draw viewer’s attention to the foreground

Don’t paint the background as well as the foreground in the same detail. Pay more attention to what is in the foreground and paint it in the finest of detail so as to catch the viewer’s attention.

6. Mix green colour carefully

The variety of green shade you can find in nature is limitless. It is up to you to mix the green shades carefully in order to get the right proportion you need. The market is flooded with an assortment of green colours; emerald green, olive green, cadmium green and lots more. Green is basically a mixture of blue and yellow base. By practising regularly you would be able to mix right proportion of blue and yellow and come up with the green colour you are looking for.

7. Paint the same landscape several times

Paint the same landscape over and over again in different hues, light and seasons. It does not become monotonous as you may think. In fact, you would be able to understand the landscape more clearly and make it even more beautiful every time you would paint it anew.

8. Study landscape paintings closely

Keep all these points in mind while painting a beautiful landscape. And before embarking on this, do study landscape paintings by some of the great masters and contemporary artists. Browse art galleries or online fine art galleries to gain vital exposure to varied kinds of landscape paintings.

More importantly, buy a landscape painting from a reputed art gallery and study it carefully whenever you can, as often as you can to absorb the intricacies of how a painter views a landscape and expresses it on canvas. Then begin creating your own painting and you will find that you have soon gained the confidence and the steadiness of brush strokes to make a beautiful landscape painting.

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Tony Chalmers is a journalist and an art aficionado who has written several insightful articles on various tribal ethnic groups and contemporary artists. He is a proud owner of some beautiful original oil paintings which he has bought from a reputed online art gallery.

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