14-Day Beginner Series - Landscape

Hi, I'm Mackenzie Swenson, and welcome back to the 14-day Beginner Series with the Artist's Academy. Today, we're gonna be talking about landscape as the subject matter for your drawings and paintings. We're gonna kind of explore what are the different approaches you can take to landscape. And I'm gonna share a little bit about my experience with it. I will definitely say there are a lot of elements of landscape drawing and painting that I haven't personally done within my practice, but I'll give you some ideas on, kind of what the spectrum of things you can do within the subject of landscape are.

So some of the main things that people use landscape for are, of course, a thing unto itself. So with that, the two approaches that people usually take are what's called alla prima painting, or plein air painting. So that's on location, you do quick studies, you're observing everything directly from life. You can do that in kind of any medium you wanna do, whether it's just sketching with pencils, or watercolor, or oil paints, or acrylics. And then another thing that you can do is take those studies or take photo references, and do more finished pieces back in the studio.

So a lot of the different schools of paintings, like the Hudson River School, that had painters like Thomas Moran, they would go do these studies, and then they'd take them back to the studio, most of the time. Some of them did it on location, and they're a little crazy. But they would do these big, massive, beautiful, highly-rendered paintings based on studies, and sketches, and observations that they had done in person, on location. So I'm just gonna show you a couple of examples. This is kind of what I do when I'm going out and doing landscape painting.

So mostly the way that I've used it in my practice is plein air painting, so just going out on location. And I work mostly in oil paints, and then also I've started to dabble a little bit in watercolor and a little bit of wash. So here, I've got a couple of, these are just tiny little paintings. So each of these is probably about maybe an hour, and you can see I'm just really capturing the big shapes, the colors, some of the texture. Here's another painting.

So again, very much like broad strokes, big areas of value. These would all actually work pretty well too as studies for larger paintings if I decided that I wanted to take these and turn them into larger studio pieces. So what I do when I'm going out on location is, and the reason you see these are loose canvas with a little border around the edge, is I have these Masonite boards, and I actually just tape pieces of linen canvas down, so that gives me a little border, and then I tone it, and I have those ready to go when I go out painting. And that way I can just peel them off of the, peel them off of the board and then wait for them to dry. And it's a lot easier to transport, if I'm traveling and I want to be painting, than it is to have a bunch of individual panels, or if I tried to stretch canvas or something like that.

So that's my technique. And there's a whole kind of subcategory of tools and setups and things that people use for plein air painting. So that's kind of a whole other thing. We have a few videos about that on the site. That's what I use in my practice.

And then I've also begun to explore a little bit with watercolor. So these are just pieces of paper, but again, a similar method. Going on location, I have this, it's a smaller, thinner board, but you can see I've got two kind of in-process pieces. This one, actually, I really liked how it had started. I didn't like as much how it had turned out.

But some of them work, some of them don't work. What's nice about these quicker on-location pieces is you can kind of experiment. It's like if you put an hour or two hours into a piece and doesn't work out, well, you got to hang out in nature, had fun, it was an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. And then sometimes, sometimes it works out and you come away with something really, really lovely. So the other thing that you can do is just take individual elements that you're looking at and draw, say, a portrait of a tree, draw a flower outside, draw anything that kind of exists unto itself as an element within the landscape, a mountain, whatever it is.

So I've got a little, this is kind of a quirky little painting. I put the context in, but I really focused in on this little palm tree here. It was really fun to just kind of let the rest of it be a little bit more washy and like a block in. And then to go in and really make kind of a portrait of this little palm tree. So one other thing that landscape painting really lends itself to is varying levels of abstraction.

So I have kind of a series of paintings here that you may remember from our discussion on composition, and they all exist at different levels of abstraction. So this image, this David Grossmann landscape, really is very abstract. He's simplified it into these big blocks of color. To me, at least, it's evocative of something I've definitely seen, but it's super simplified into these big kind of emotive, moody shapes. Then you've got this Emil Carlsen who kind of exists in the middle.

It's not super highly-defined, but it's also, it's pretty clear what it is, and there's a lot of realism and detail in different moments. And then you have this, there's a figure in here, but this Fragonard painting. He's really gone into defining, like over here, every little leaf and all of the little flowers, all of the little groupings within the trees. So this is kind of an extreme of literalism in this painting. So you can kind of look around at paintings that you like and see do I like landscapes that are more on the spectrum of abstraction, more in the direction of like literalism, or somewhere in between.

I tend to gravitate more towards things that are a little bit more in between or more towards abstracted, but it's really just a matter of preference. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. And I hope that this discussion on landscape was helpful for you in figuring out what it is you want to paint.