Wolfhill

Just a few interesting points about about this landscape painting:

Perspective applies in the sky as well as on the ground. Clouds are not all the same size or shape but they generally get smaller as they approach the horizon, ie further away. The colours also tend towards grey with distance.
Perspective warps when the ground is not flat, unlike the sky which is always flat and obeys the rules of convergence (getting smaller at a regular pace). I tend to think in terms of a flat grid and place the hills and hollows onto this. Its easy to observe in a scene and draw it as you see it but as most of my landscapes are ‘created’ or constructed I have to have the grid in my mind and work on this. This is something I’ve learned with practice and I remember a time not been able to do this. So every painting is a learning experience, the more you do, the better you get.

Painting details with a small brush can be a tedious business. In this painting, the line of small trees and bushes required the small brush treatment onto a wet background. Normally this means cleaning the brush after every stroke, reloading the brush and painting again until the paint on the brush is exhausted or contaminated. In this instance I placed ‘reservoirs’ of paint in the lower areas of the hedgerow and dragged these upwards to form the small trees. If these ‘reservoirs’ become contaminated with the sky colour, that’s OK, as it adds a little detail into an otherwise dark patch of colour.

The rule of painting from the distance towards the viewer is a good one to follow. The background should slightly overlap objects in front and when these are painted you can then regain the shape of the object. The distant hills are painted over the lower reaches of the sky which was dragged down into this area. An exception to this rule concerns bright areas behind, for example, the trees on the right in this painting. Spots of light, the reflected light, placed in the gaps in the trees have a ‘halo’ effect, something you see in nature.

Remember, to achieve clean colour, keep the number of colours in your mixes to a minimum. The best way of achieving this is to use a limited number of colours to start with. The details of the colours are in the previous post. There were only 4 plus black and white.

Here’s the video.