Countryside roads of Jharkhand. Trying to work on highlights and layers. Suggestions please.
Countryside roads of Jharkhand. Trying to work on highlights and layers. Suggestions please.
Looking good, makes me feel like I should spend more time painting outdoors.
I am always drawn to paintings that have great colors and light play. Yours are a delight to the eye. Your style is very pleasing.
Thanks for your encouragement.
Good one! Have a seat and keep painting on this rock because it all comes down this road, after a fashion. You just have to grab it when it does.
Do you always paint out of your head or do you use reference? I thought I heard you make these up out of memory or whatever. My suggestion is to use reference and learn to observe, if you want to learn realism.
On the other hand, if you are painting out of your head because it's so vivid inside your mind, then you may want to consider ways that are less demanding of precision replicating the source, and get into stylizing your painting, working freer with where the materials take you. It's a bit of a fork in the road initially. All painting is good that you do because you're connecting your hand to your eye and mind.
So facility there is something you want. It's just a matter, as a beginning painter, to look around at what is possible both by looking at other people's work in many different styles to find one that you resonate with, and another way also is you can learn some mechanical things about how color and lighting work and how painters achieve those effects, and so on. Obviously rules will be more important with realism. But nothing is wasted. Just keep painting.
If you are doing this just for the joy of painting as you are doing it, then enjoy that. But if you want to get better, you need a clear idea of where it is you want this road to take your art.
Last edited by D Akey; 04-15-2015 at 06:40 AM.
"Not a bit is wasted and the best is yet to come. . ." -- remembered from a dream
Sir, I get what you are saying. Enjoyment of painting keeps me going, but sure I need to improvise on basics. Let me see how far I can go in this, thanks again for your suggestions.
I like this peaceful countryside view and the road which invites us to walk and look for new horizons ...
Panta rei (everything flows)!
fThanks, sir.
Posing my countryside landscape, it's very colorful with new leaves at this time of year. Painted in layers, trying to work from behind forwards. Tried to blend subsequently using options, but couldn't do foreground to my liking! Suggestions please.
Looks nice overall. But you are right to wonder what might be the reason the foreground is not what you were after. Sometimes we have to exaggerate and rely on formula thinking to make certain effects happen. You're doing them to a subtle degree, but it's still very close -- the variations indicating depth are not that evident because you have a light touch.
In this case, I think there are three ways to show depth that you could consider: Values (light and dark), Color (saturation and color temperature) and Perspective (using scale, vanishing and overlap).
I would point out that values serve artists, one instance of which is to show depth. Things that are dark tend to come forward toward the viewer, and things that are light, meaning things that don't have a dark component tend to recede.
Things naturally get bigger when closer. And overlapping shows which is closer. So artists will sometimes introduce a foreground element that works both to frame a picture in various ways, and it gives a starting point (close) that then by contrast makes other things recede as the scale diminishes.
Saturation and color = things get warmer as they get closer, and cooler as they recede (in exteriors whether it looks that way to the eye or not it's good to include for depth). But how you place your color in one area establishes what is happening elsewhere.
Artists break rules all the time either from not being aware of it, or they are trying to test limits. But rules work, so beginners would do well to follow rules and learn to exploit those things. There are so many things happening in paintings, so many choices going on, that following rules helps to keep it from getting overwhelming and getting to a point in a painting where you scratch your head wondering why something isn't quite right. It's a checklist of sorts.
Your painting isn't bad. There are a lot of nice things going on. I like the strokes and so on.
But you were asking so these are some of the key things that artists use. And what many of us do is check those things and assess what might be the problem and fix that. It's always best to incorporate those things at the start of the painting. It usually works. It sounds complicated, but once you do it a few times, it becomes second nature as you make your selections throughout the painting process and you are then free to go after that which motivated your painting in the first place -- the essence of the subject of your picture.
Last edited by D Akey; 04-19-2015 at 05:17 AM.
"Not a bit is wasted and the best is yet to come. . ." -- remembered from a dream