Upon painting a landscape, Claire asked me: “Can you please advise as to how I should paint all of that greenery?”
I answered: “I’d start by first working through composition problems with your photo and create a composition sketch to pull out important forms prior to painting – there’s often quite bit of rock, colour changes, meadows and other features often hiding in those trees”.
One approach then, is to think of the painting in terms of three segments and then tackle each with a view to creating contrast between foreground, mid-ground and background.
The key is to split all that greenery into different segments and then tackle each with a view to creating contrast between the segments, using different brushwork and colours to split them up. This will help define focus too. It’s your call as to how you divide things up and an example on this idea follows. As always, a value sketch will help too – defining the values between the foreground, mid-ground and background.
I’d also have an eye to using atmosphere to enhance perspective: with distance, greens fade to blue-grey, losing light and dark contrast because of what might be referred to as “atmospheric veil”.
Break-a-Brush!
David