What are the 4 Basic Elements of Landscape Painting
May 2, 2008
What Are the Basic Elements of Landscape Painting?
The fine art of landscape painting, and any other genre, can be distilled down to 4 Basic Elements:
- Drawing
- Values
- Colors
- Edges
Each of these basics can be simply defined:
Drawing has to do with composition. It involves not only placement of your center of interest, but the overall design of your painting’s big shapes. By big shapes I mean the negative space around your center of interest as well as the overall shape of the foreground, middle ground and background. The painter should think in terms of masses. The use of line should be kept to a minimum.
Value means simply how light or dark one shape is relative to another. This involves squinting at your subject to see what is in the light and what is in the shadow. John F. Carlson, in his Guide to Landscape Painting, identified four basic value planes:
- Sky – lightest
- Ground plane – second lightest
- Sloped planes – third lightest
- Vertical planes – darkest
Regarding values John Singer Sargent referred to five types of light:
- light
- midtone
- shadow
- accents
- reflected light
Color has three main characteristics:
- hue
- saturation
- temperature
Hue, put simply, answers the question, “What color is it?”
Saturation has to do with intensity. Is the color muted and neutral or is it pure and clean.
Temperature is a relative concept. If we think of the traditional color wheel there are three primary and three secondary colors. The primaries are red, yellow and blue. They are primary because we can’t mix them from two other colors. The secondaries are orange, green and purple. They are secondary because we get them by mixing two primaries. It seems obvious that blue is the coolest of these. Indeed its neighbors on the color wheel, green and purple are cool because they contain blue. Opposite blue on the wheel is orange. Being opposite of blue, it stands to reason that, orange must be warmest.
Indeed, its neighbors on the color wheel, red and yellow, are relatively warm. Neither contains blue. The fact that we mix orange from two warms, proves it is the warmest.
Even with the myriad of tubed colors available to painters today it is still impossible to paint the complete spectrum of color which God used in creating the world around us. Because we can’t match our subject tone for tone we must learn to paint relationships. Is this passage warmer or cooler, more intense or neutral, than that passage?
Edges, often overlooked by painters and instructors are no less important. Edges are defined as the juncture between two masses. A painting can and should have sharp, soft and lost edges. Edges are a wonderful tool for controlling the viewers eye. We identify the hierarchy of edges within in our painting by squinting at our subject. The most interesting and sharpest edges should be near your center of interest.
Click here for more in depth discussion about these and other subjects related to the fine art of landscape painting.
Plein Air Paintings by Florida Gulf Coast artist Robert J. Simone
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[...] where you paint from a still life or better yet, landscapes outdoors (plein air). Learn about John Singer Sargent’s Five Types of Light and John F. Carlson’s Four Value Planes. Realize that painting boils down to Shapes, [...]