From the course: Painting Foundations: Light and the Landscape

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts.

Four tones of the landscape

Four tones of the landscape

From the course: Painting Foundations: Light and the Landscape

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Four tones of the landscape

“

(soft piano music) - When I'm deciding on a landscape to paint I look for areas of very light, very dark, and then a few mid tones within the scene. So, initially I'm not looking at what shade the green is going to be, or what pigment would be best used, but rather if I took a black and white photograph of the view how would it look. And if you quint your eyes at a subject it helps you to be able to see the big differences between the tonal masses more easily. Thinking about the black and white tones gives us a framework as to whether the scene is going to work compositionally as a painting. But most importantly for this lesson it also helps to guide our color mixing. You can split a scene into varying degrees of tonal groups. I'll often use three or four tones for very quick sketches and sometimes as many as eight or nine if I just want to get a feel for the painting before committing to color in a larger scale. In John Carlson's book, Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting, he talks…

Contents