Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Impasto

Common Hawthorns
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

Impasto is the topic of Lesson 44 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler. Philip defines impasto as meaning thick paint and describes how applying the paint thickly can create a textured surface. Traditional tools for impasto painting are stiff brushes and palette knifes, but you can use a variety of other implements to apply and sculpt the paint. 

Philip explains:

... impasto has implied Expressionist responses to the subject, the physicality of the material as a metaphor for the physicality of the subject.

But he cautions:

... if the whole painting is painted thickly then the textual quality of this image will cause the pictorial space to flatten.

I followed his advice to save impasto for the foreground, or in this case the trees at the centre of interest.

I painted a background using thin layers of paint gradating from dark to light in the sky and grass to draw the eye to the horizon.

Common Hawthorns
Background

I was dissatisfied with the waviness of the horizon and the little speck of green in the sky. I was tempted to paint it again, but I’ve learnt my lesson from the endless repetitions of the glazing exercise (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Glazing (Part 2)). "Finished, not perfect" is my new mantra and I realised these small imperfections were going to be irrelevant in the final painting. 

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Glazing (Part 2)

The Lakes - Winter Morning
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Glazing describes my initial experiences with Lesson 43 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler. It explains how I tried to paint this scene using watery washes of acrylic. My first effort was garish and after that they became uglier and uglier. After many attempts, I accepted the need to try something different, so I went back to Phillip’s suggestion of painting over an existing study – which is a much better way to get started.

The Lakes - Winter Morning
Initial Underpainting

I painted this monochrome underpainting (a grisaillle) using Payne's Grey and Titanium White. I then adjusted the picture using a mixture of layering and glazing. If the tone needed to change (like in the sky or extreme foreground), I glazed over it with a semi-transparent layer. If the underlying shapes (like the foreground slope) needed to change, I obscured the original with an opaque layer. 

The Lakes - Winter Morning
Refined Underpainting

After refining the study, I glazed over it with colour. This worked a lot better than my previous attempt at using an underpainting technique (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Underpainting).

By painting this image repeatedly for months, I’ve learnt more about handling acrylic paint, but at the expense of letting my compositional skills atrophy. I need to focus on quantity not quality of paintings for a while because each time you finish a painting, you’ve gone through the whole process from finding a subject and creating a composition all the way through to finishing the painting. This helps to improves all your skills - not just one of them. There is evidence that if you focus on quantity, quality begins to take care of itself.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Glazing

Country Landscape
(Based on Don Rankin's Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor)
Acrylic on Paper
14cm x 14cm (5.5" x 5.5")

Lesson 43 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about Glazing techniques. Philip defines a glaze as a thin layer of transparent paint used to modify the colour or tone of a painting. It’s a bit like adding a filter in a photo editing app. You can use glazes to warm things up, cool them down or otherwise alter the atmosphere of a picture. You can glaze the whole painting or just a part of it.

Phillip suggests glazing over some of you existing studies. I didn’t have anything suitable, so I tried a more ambitious exercise. I attempted to create a painting entirely with glazes using the techniques described for watercolour by Don Rankin in Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor. 

The Lakes - Winter Morning
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

This was my first effort. It’s interesting, but far from what I intended. After that, things went downhill. As I tried to reduce the vibrancy, my attempts got uglier and uglier. The main challenges are the intensity and opaqueness of acrylics when compared to watercolour. You need to thin the acrylic to an almost homeopathic level of dilution to get anything like a watery watercolour wash and even then, it still doesn’t behave like watercolour. After 6 attempts, I accepted I needed a simpler subject, so I went back to the exercises from Don’s books (see Glazing Techniques). I enjoyed painting them and they provided an opportunity to experiment with different cocktails of water, glazing medium and flow improver.

Sea Mist
(Based on Don Rankin's Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor)
Acrylic on Paper
14cm x 14cm (5.5" x 5.5")

I still prefer my original watercolour versions, but I am beginning to see how I can apply these techniques to acrylics and I’m looking forward to getting back to the picture I wanted to paint.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Scumbling and Drybrush

First Light
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

I combined lesson 41 and 42 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler.

Lesson 41 is about Scumbling - the application of paint as a broken layer. Philp suggests scrubbing the paint on to the surface. This:

"causes the paint to go on really thinly, making for an optically porous surface (the ground comes through)."

Other writers describe scumbling techniques using “a drybrush and a loose hand” or rags.

Lesson 42 is about Drybrush – carefully dragging a brush with almost dry pigment over the painting surface to create a broken layer of fine marks.

Philip differentiates drybrush as being more controlled than scumbling. Both techniques create the impression of texture and depth by building up broken layers of paint. They can be used to achieve a blurred or soft appearance. 

I’ve experimented with drybrush in watercolour to give the impression of textures such as tree bark (see Branches, Roots, Hardwood Tree Bark, Conifer Tree Bark, Wood Grain, Volcanic Rock and Silver Birch).

In watercolour you are helped if you use a rough paper because the brush catches and leaves paint on the ridges, but not in the valleys. I am finding it trickier with acrylics because I am painting on a smooth surface. I suspect the trick is either to use a rougher surface or to roughen the surface with an unevenly applied gesso or impasto layer.

In the picture at the top of this post, I started off with scumbling and progressed towards drybrush in later layers, particularly on and around the boats.

Philp suggested experimenting with a dark ground.

Dark Ground and Drawing

I like the effect of the white pencil drawing on the umber background. I nearly decided this was finished. 

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Pointillism

Hurst Point Lighthouse
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

Lesson 40 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler begins with an explanation of Pointillism. It’s a technique in which you apply the paint as small dots of pure colour. The viewer's mind optically blends the colours which makes them appear more vibrant.

It’s a time-consuming technique because it requires the use of small brushes to create the tiny dots. It’s not something I have much enthusiasm to try. Fortunately, Philip suggests “By increasing the size of the brush and mixing other hues the technique of dabs and dashes can be explored.” This seemed more achievable in a reasonable amount of time and also something that might fit into the way I want to paint.

This was a great lesson. I learnt more about working with acrylics, both in the actual painting and in the whole process of getting set up and cleared away. Importantly, I also started to embrace the benefits of acrylics. One of which is you can leave them to dry and paint over things to correct mistakes and to refine the picture.

As well as painting, I am working on composition using the ideas that Ian Roberts shares on his Mastering Composition YouTube channel.

I painted a different view of the lighthouse back in 2012 (see Capturing Light and Negative Painting).

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Alla Prima

Pensile Road
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

"Alla prima" is Italian for "at first" or "at once". In oil painting terminology it means completing a painting in one sitting, applying the paint wet-on-wet. It results in pictures that are spontaneous and expressive. It is also the subject of Lesson 39 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler.

Phillip suggests placing the paint carefully and being forthright in your mark making. The idea is to get the paint down and leave it. The more you mess around with paint, the muddier the colours become. By putting the paint down and leaving it, you retain the freshness of the colours and the expressiveness of your original marks.

I cross referenced Phillip's guidance with advice from: 

• Carol Marine's book Daily Painting
• Ian Roberts' YouTube channel Mastering Composition 

All three agree on the importance of slowing down and painting mindfully – making sure you have mixed the right colour and you are putting it exactly where you want it.

I am cutting myself some slack with this picture because it is only my second painting in acrylics. I am making life additionally difficult by trying to work out how to use acrylics like oil paints. Currently, I am struggling with balancing thickness and opacity. I’ve thought about painting some experimental swatches to learn more about how the paint behaves, but painting pictures is more fun and helps to practice other skills as well.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Oil Painting

Sunflowers
Acrylic on Paper
23cm x 14.5cm (9" x 5.75")

Spoiler - This isn’t an oil painting or a landscape. 

Lesson 38 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about oil painting. Philip provides a beginner’s guide to oils and suggests a materials list.

I am wary of using oil paints because of the toxic fumes from their traditional solvents. Research reveals a lot of conflicting opinions about the practicality of non toxic oil painting. In the end, I went with my gut instinct, which is to paint in acrylics, but to try to create paintings that look like oil paintings. I am planning to use acrylics for the remaining lessons in Chapter 7.

In this painting, I'm trying to emulate the alla prima approach from Carol Marine's her book Daily Painting.

Things didn't go to plan and I had improvise, but the painting is not a total disaster. It was a great learning experience and I'm looking forward to the next one. Lesson 39 is Alla Prima painting, so I'm going to find a simple landscape to paint. 

You can finds a playlist of 4 videos about this painting on my YouTube channel (My First Acrylic Painting). 

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Underpainting

Downham Hill (Smallpox Hill) from Uley Bury
Underpainting - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Acrylic on MDF
20cm x 40cm (7.75" x 17.75")

Lesson 38 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler introduces underpainting as a technique used by historical painters. They would create a monochromatic painting using cheap quick drying pigments to establish the composition and major tonal values. They would then glaze this with more expensive pigments introducing colour and more subtle tonal shifts. He points out that monochromatic underpainting provides another opportunity to work with a new medium without having to deal with the complexity of colour.

I created this underpainting with a 10-year-old, unopened tube of a cheap Payne’s Grey acrylic. I also glazed it with 10-year-old acrylics. These were better quality, but also unopened. 

Underpainting - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Acrylic on MDF
20cm x 40cm (7.75" x 17.75")

This is the most ambitious painting I’ve tried in acrylics. One of the biggest challenges was that some colours barely tinted the underpainting, while others completely obscured it. I should have expected this because the transparency/opacity of different pigments is an important factor in watercolour, but it still blindsided me when the same thing became important for acrylic glazes. It is only when I wrote this post that I compared the two versions of the picture. Each change of tone in the underpainting is still visible in the glazed version - even when I thought the underpainting was completely obliterated, it still has an impact on the final painting - lesson learnt.

Philip suggests experimenting with different underpainting colours, but one is enough for me (for the time being). This exercise has opened my eyes to acrylics. I’m excited to paint some more, but this style of underpainting is not top of my list of techniques to explore.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Masking

Dart Moorings
Watercolour on Paper
15.5cm x 23.5cm (6" x 9.25")

Lesson 36 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler starts with a discussion of masking and then introduces a number of other watercolour topics.

Masking is the technique of using a fluid (rubber solution) or tape to preserve the white of the paper. You could just carefully paint around the white areas, but masking them makes life easier. I wrote about this approach recently (see A Fuzzy Background).

Some people never use masking because it can cause problems. Most notably, the edges created by masking can appear too hard and prominent. Masking fluid is also notorious for wrecking brushes. You have to use an old brush and protect the bristles by covering them in soap; which can make it difficult to apply the masking fluid accurately. It can also tear the paper if you leave it too long before removing it.

In honour of this lesson, I bought a fine tipped masking fluid applicator (Jackson's Masking Fluid Applicator) to mask the boats in this painting. It was the least stressful masking fluid experience I can remember.

A monochrome study of this scene in which the horizon was much lower (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Monochrome Study) made me suspect the composition would work better with more water and less sky.

Dart Moorings -  Thumbnail Sketch - 6.5cm x 10cm (2.5" x 4")
Pencil on Paper
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook

A thumbnail helped to confirm this before committing to paint.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Monochrome Study

Moorings on the Dart
Monochrome Study - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Watercolour on Paper
16.5cm x 24cm (6.5" x 9.5")

Chapter 7 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about painting. Philip provides an introduction to a variety of media and techniques. The first is watercolour which he suggests is a big mistake for beginners because:

Watercolour is the most difficult painting medium to use well as it is unforgiving, allowing you little room for error.

He also points out:

It is a good idea to create a crisp linear drawing to establish the placement of the key elements of the landscape. 

This advice made me realise I’ve let my drawing practice slip and I need to do something about it.

Lesson 35 is a monochrome study in watercolour. Phillip recommends monochromes as a way to get started with watercolour while avoiding the additional complexity of having to think about colour.

The exercise is similar to Lesson 18 Wash Media, but in watercolour instead of ink. It provided an opportunity to experiment with the composition and approach for two pictures I am planning to paint. In both of them, I overdid the masking fluid and applied it too clumsily – lesson learnt.

The study of the boats on the Dart helped me to work out how to build up the layers of the landscape and how to paint the distant background..

Tree Tunnel - Westonbirt
Monochrome Study - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Watercolour on Paper
16.5cm x 24cm (6.5" x 9.5")

I wasn’t sure the tree tunnel would work without a lot of painstaking detail. The monochrome has persuaded me it will

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Format

Composition for Parkmill Pond (1:2)

Lesson 34 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is a the last lesson in the chapter on Composition. Phillip starts by pointing out:

Changing the format of your image can have a profound impact on your work.

He urges:

Don’t fall into the trap of complacency, stretch yourself, challenge how you approach the composition of the landscape.

He goes on to suggest a number of ways to train your compositional muscles, but doesn’t suggest a specific exercise. One of his first suggestions is to cut up an image so you can see all the positive and negative shapes because:

Often, good composition is a way of ensuring that each shape in your image is interesting and different, yet their overall effect is to create harmony through the opposition of different forces.

As an exercise I decided to break a photo into shapes and use them as the basis for a composition.

Parkmill Pond, Woodchester Park

This is Parkmill Pond in Woodchester Park.

Parkmill Pond (17 Shapes)

My first attempt at identifying shapes, resulted in 17 shapes. The frilly foreground overlaps the objects behind it, dividing them into multiple small shapes. This is too many - Tom Hoffman suggests a maximum of 10 shapes in the Five-Value Monochrome Study from his Watercolor-Painting. 

Parkmill Pond (10 Shapes)

Simplifying the foreground shape, reduces the overall shape count to 10. I plan to paint the foreground grasses overlapping the water, but these are adornments. The "bulk" of the foreground shape is the simpler object in this second picture.

Parkmill Pond - Separating the Shapes

Separating the shapes shows they are interesting and varied, but they are predominately horizontal - they don't provide any contrast between horizontal and vertical. My plan is this tension will come from the rendering of the shapes. There will be lots of vertical lines to suggest the textures in the grasses, trees and reflections.

After identifying the shapes, the next step was to answer two compositional questions:

• What format to use for the picture?
• What is the focus / centre of interest?

Towards the end of the lesson, Phillip suggests:

By limiting yourself, maybe to a particular format or a particular use of media, you can begin to clarify your intention, to know what you want to say.

My initial format choice was 7 by 10 because I paint in water-based media (watercolour, acrylic and gouache) and I have two Arches watercolour blocks (a small and a large one) both with proportions of 7 by 10.

What is the centre of interest? There is a tower (“The Tower”) tucked away in the background trees, but this is a painting about the lake, so the patch of bright water towards the rear of the lake makes a good focal point.

I investigated a number of ways to resize the image to 7 by 10:

• Just squashing it all in
• Various zooms and crops

I also explored the position of the bright patch of water using a rule of thirds grid and a phi grid (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Rule of Thirds)

Composition for Parkmill Pond (7:10)

After a bit of tinkering, this is the result. I prefer the 1 by 2 version at the top of the post. There are some landscapes, probably those with mainly horizontal shapes, that I think look better in a more panoramic format. I've decided to limit myself to 3 formats for watercolour paintings: 7:10, 1:1 and 1:2. I chose 1:1 and 1:2 because they are simple to measure and they seem to work well for some subjects (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Root Rectangles).

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Compositional Principles

Farm Cottages - Latest Thumbnail - 7cm x 10cm (2.75" x 4")
Compositional Principles - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Ink and Watercolour on Paper
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook

The bulk of Lesson 33 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is a review of John Ruskin’s 9 laws of composition from The Elements of Drawing:

• Principality
• Repetition
• Continuity
• Curvature
• Radiation
• Contrast
• Interchange
• Consistency
• Harmony

Phillip sneaks in a couple of extras. Stillness might be accepted unchallenged, but Photo Manipulation isn’t getting on to a list published in 1857.

The exercise for the lesson involves taking as many different photos of a subject as possible and then making a series of compositional studies. 

I selected some local cottages and took a load of photos. My initial experiments concerned the placement of the major horizontal divisions. I tried a few different arrangements before settling on the first one; which is often the way. The next step was a small thumbnail to explore where the buildings fitted into this schema and some initial ideas about tone. 

Farm Cottages - Initial Thumbnails - Each 3.5cm x 5cm (1.5" x 2")
Compositional Principles - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Ink on Paper
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook

Then I moved on to slightly bigger thumbnails to investigate the drawing, tones and colours. 

Farm Cottages - Thumbnails - Each 7cm x 10cm (2.75" x 4")
Compositional Principles - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Ink, Watercolour and Graphite on Paper
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook

These studies didn't enthuse me, so I tried a few more small drawings to find a less central placement for the buildings.

Farm Cottages - Off-centre Thumbnails - Each 3.5cm x 5cm (1.5" x 2")
Compositional Principles - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Ink on Paper
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook

The drawing at the top of the post investigates colour and tone for the repositioned buildings. I also plan to create some texture in the foreground and add some small flashes of bold colour in the focal point amongst the buildings.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Rule of Thirds

 

St Ives Harbour - Buildings - Rule of Thirds

Lesson 32 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about the rule of thirds - a popular technique for composing visual images. The “rule” divides a scene into thirds (both horizontally and vertically) using two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines. Aligning important elements of a picture along these lines or at their intersections is supposed to create more visual interest than placing the subject at the centre.

Rule of Thirds Grid

Philip suggests exploring the rule of thirds in your compositions. As an exercise, I tried to improve the two images I picked in the Root Rectangle exercise. I used a rule of thirds and a phi grid to refine the selections - a phi grid is like a rule of thirds grid except it divides the image according to the Divine Proportion resulting in grid lines that are closer together; which in turn moves the more important elements of your picture closer to the centre.

Phi Grid

I looked at over 20 different options for each scene and ended up with selections almost identical to the ones I picked in the original exercise.

St Ives Harbour - Boats - Rule of Thirds

In both cases I favour images in which the lower third is a foreground of empty sand. As I work on the pictures some more, I may try to include some extra details and contrast at some of the points of intersection.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Root Rectangles

 

St Ives Harbour - Root-4 Rectangle

Lesson 31 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is another lesson about composition with a foundation in mathematics. 

Wikipedia defines a root rectangle as 

A rectangle in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the square root of an integer, such as √2, √3, etc..

Phillip explains how to draw a root-2 rectangle (√2 rectangle) by starting with a square, measuring the diagonal and extending two opposite sides to be the length of the diagonal. 

Root-2 Rectangle

You can then draw a root-3 rectangle by measuring the diagonal of the root-2 rectangle and extending the long sides to be the length of this diagonal.

Root-3 Rectangle

You draw a root-4 rectangle by extending the longer sides to be the length of the root-3 rectangle’s diagonal, and so on.

One of the interesting properties of root rectangles is:

If you divide a root-N rectangle along its long side into N equal subdivisions, all the little rectangles are also root-N rectangles, for example, if you divide a root-5 rectangle into 5 equal slices, all the little rectangles are also root-5 rectangles

Root-5 Rectangle with Subdivisions

Some people believe this symmetry is a thing of beauty and provides a good underlying structure for the composition of a picture (if you are interested, check out the Wikipedia article - Dynamic rectangle). 

Philp points out the paper sizes in the A series (A0, A1, A2, A3, A4, etc) are all root-2 rectangles. If you divide a root-2 rectangle in half, both halves are also root-2 rectangles. Cut a piece of A0 in half and you have 2 pieces of A1, cut a piece of A1 in half and you have 2 pieces of A2, and so on.

A Paper

Phillip suggests a sketchbook exercise creating a series of compositions in squares and different root rectangles. I did a slightly different exercise. I took a holiday photograph which isn't an obvious candidate to paint.

St Ives Harbour - Source Photo

I searched this picture for squares and root rectangles that have the most promise as paintings. My favourites are the image at the top of the post and this one.

St Ives Harbour - Square

I will refine and improve them in the next lessons.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - The Divine Proportion

Divine Mousehole Harbour

Lesson 30 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about the Divine Proportion – probably the most aesthetically beautiful division of a line in the world. 

The Divine Proportion has many pseudonyms: the golden ratio, the golden section, the golden mean, the golden proportion, the golden cut, the golden number, the divine section, phi, etc, etc. 

If you want to learn more, Wikipedia has an article  (see Golden ratio).

Philip defines the divine proportion:

It is the division of a line into two parts, where the small part relates to the bigger as the bigger part relates to the whole.

This is what it looks like - and some equations for good measure

The Divine Proportion

Philip explains how to draw a golden rectangle (a rectangle with side lengths in the golden ratio) by starting off with a square and adding on a rectangle - using a ruler, setsquare and compass.

Drawing a Golden Rectangle

The interesting thing is, the rectangle we add on is also a golden rectangle because golden rectangles exhibit a form of self-similarity.

If we start off with a golden rectangle, and add a square to its long side, we end up with another golden rectangle

Another Golden Rectangle

Add another square to its long side, we end up with another golden rectangle

And Another

And so, on

Golden Spiral (Approximate)

Look familiar? (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape - What is the proportion of the rectangle?)

Philip suggests analysing some of your favourite landscapes to see if key parts of the composition conform to the divine proportion.

I studied quite a few pictures - new and old. I didn’t find a lot of correlations. One of the panels was almost a golden rectangle. 

The Beach at Trouville (with a Golden Rectangle)
Eugène Boudin
From Wikimedia Commons

The placement of the sun in Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" divides both the horizontal and vertical almost perfectly by their divine proportion.

Impression, Sunrise (with a Phi Grid)
Claude Monet
From Wikimedia Commons

That was about it. This analysis of historic paintings didn’t convince me that the great artists made/make use of the divine proportion, but as an exercise I applied it to a photo I am using as the source for a painting. 

Mousehole Harbour

I thought the composition of the photo was pretty good – lose some of the boats close to the left-hand side – job done. I investigated a lot of different crops using a phi grid to apply the divine proportion. Zooming in, aligning the strong horizontal under the buildings with the upper divine proportion and the major boats with the left-hand divine proportion gives (for me) a more pleasing composition (see the photo at the top of the post). I will emphasise these alignments some more in my preparatory sketches.