A Guide to Painting Landscapes using Oils

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Painting landscapes involves depicting an expanse of natural scenery such as rivers, valleys, forests, mountains, and trees. The medium that a painter chooses for landscape painting determines the technique that can be used to ensure comfort, fluidity and varying degrees of pressure on the canvas.

Painting landscapes is done using different kinds of paints such as oils, water colors and acrylics. For simple and interesting landscape paintings, oil paints are a perfect medium. Note that one of the most important aspects of landscape paintings is the way you arrange the shapes during the composition stage. Getting the shapes arranged correctly at the start is vital. You can make it look as natural as possible by using shadow and contrast effects. Don’t feel you have to squeeze in every little detail because that can over complicate your composition.

Tips to Start Painting Landscapes

Here are some tips to start painting a traditional landscape painting using oil paints:

• Start with a simple landscape with minimal objects as getting the details right using oils can be quite difficult.
• Decide where the horizon line is and draw it very lightly on your canvas. Identify specific sections to break your landscape composition by drawing or dividing with lines.
• When you paint the sky, observe where you insert a base layer for the clouds as well, following which some white space is required so that you can blend in the first layer. Then add the second layer.
• Try to incorporate the subtle variations of color in the sky with clouds. Add lighter colors first and then make them darker. For clouds, start with light and dark blue and gray shades. Use white pastels to cover the cloud area and let it subtly overlap to other portions so as to blend into the sky.
• Wherever shades of blue are dominant, avoid using orange or yellow as that could give it a green tinge.
• Repeat this layering process on all other sections. Note the breakup where the land portion needs to be covered.
• Sketching out the basic shapes and repeating the process of color, adding layers and blending more color is important. Try using colors like yellow or tan over the top of the shapes to create a more artistic effect.
• Make sure your painting has a balanced, tonal quality and work to achieve that by refining it with soft edges.
• Use a hazy effect by simply highlighting certain areas.
• On completing your landscape painting, use soft, brush strokes to give it a final, finishing touch.

The best thing about landscape paintings is that natural forms of beauty can be portrayed in various ways with the different use of texture and color. Landscape artists can draw inspiration from all natural beauty they see around them and interpret it in their own unique works of art.