Asignment #3: Landscape

You are to make two landscape paintings in oil that are at least 8x10, and no larger than 16x20.

This project is all about making space—or the illusion of it.  It’s also about controlling color relationships in terms of contrast and “chromatic hygiene” (high contrast advances low contrast recedes, and clean color advances and broken color recedes).

Utilize the strategies to create space that we went over in class during the analysis exercises. However, before you start each painting, you must make a value drawing of the composition.  Make sure it is balanced.  Even though the emphasis of this project is about color control, you can often solve color problems by reducing them to value problems.  You will show me your value drawings at the beginning of next week and when we critique the paintings.

One of the paintings must be predominantly buildings or constructed objects.  The natural landscape should be non-existent. The other one should be predominantly natural landscape with a minimum of human intervention. Other than that, the subjects may be of anything as long as they are (mostly) outside and include close foreground, middle ground and infinite space.  You may work from photos, or you may work from life. If you work outside from life (the preferred way of working for many landscape painters), you will find that the light will change--the sun tends to move if you hadn’t noticed--during the time you are working, so you have to paint quickly and plan to come back to the same spot at the same time for two or more days.  I’d suggest making either a sunny day painting or a cloudy day painting if you choose a daytime painting.  If you start a painting sunny and finish it cloudy you will drive yourself crazy and you’ll end up with a confusing result.  Trust me!

I strongly encourage you to choose a moment in your painting to be what the painting is about, and then make everything else in the painting merely support that moment.   Don’t just paint a scene.  Also, don’t make a “pretty” painting.  “Pretty” is bad. 

Hints

*Remember the different ways to create the illusion of space:

1-clean colors advance, and broken colors recede.

2-high contrast and hard edges advance, low contrast and soft edges        recede.

3-saturated colors advance, less intense colors recede

*Squint a lot.  This will force you to simplify. 

*Don’t forget your drawing skills.  Make sure your perspective works.

*Values tend to be very high outdoors.  The sun tends to eat away the darks and we find that they are relatively light (though still darker than the lights).  What at first glance seems like a value contrast might be more of an intensity contrast or temperature contrast.

*Research ideas from the old or contemporary masters—try to paint like them!

*Lastly, decide your approach BEFORE the painting begins, and stick to it (which of the four? Or a hybrid?)!