On Landscape Painting
When I started making art several years ago, I wanted to make grand fantasy landscapes. I could lose myself for hours staring into far off worlds painted with soft atmospheric light, depicting imposing megaliths, ruins, moonlit seascapes, dreamy surrealist vistas.
I was unfortunate enough to have some early success following some tutorials on how to make some planets using pixel art. I was very happy with the results I got from those, and it gave me ambition well beyond my ability.
But I ran into impossible difficulty whenever I tried to branch out from that one subject and style. I couldn't find any clear roadmap for what skills I would need to be able to paint what I had in my mind. This is a guide for younger me. Hopefully it will help you on the same journey, or you can apply the lessons to your own subject.
This will take time
Be prepared to take several years to reach a satisfactory point, and several years more to master techniques that will really let your creativity flourish. It doesn't matter if you are a fast learner, this will take time, even if you study it full time. This is a vast subject, or group of subjects, and it takes time to learn it all. It takes even more time for it to become habitual, to the point of being able to use the knowledge well.
Don't get frustrated by this. It's normal to produce a lot of really mediocre sketches and paintings in the meantime. Learn to enjoy the process. And when you discover smaller, individual elements that you can draw, enjoy practicing them. If you can paint a rock, or a tree, don't hold back from practicing a bunch of those. You can still make art that satisfies you along the way. Keep a record of your progress and enjoy looking back to see how much you've improved, rather than always comparing your work to the landscape artists you aspire to emulate.
What's Involved?
Painting landscapes is a complex skill, meaning it is composed of many parts. You need to be able to accurately depict the outlines of any of the objects you want to paint, whether they be mountains, trees, rocks, vehicles, figures, planetary bodies, or buildings. You need to be able to rotate and place those objects in perspective, put them on a surface believably, adjusting their angles to relate to the viewpoint of the onlooker, shrink or expand them depending on their distance from the viewer, and overlap them with other objects.
From there, you need to be able to understand the light sources hitting your image. You need to shade the objects you've drawn so that the light illuminates the surfaces facing it and casts shadows on the other sides. This lighting will be affected by weather and time of day, as well as by the distance from the viewer, the objects surrounding each object, and the material the object is made of. This requires all the skills required in the other types of painting, namely manipulating shapes and edges.
You need to be able to believably indicate the texture of each object, though the amount of detail varies widely depending on how close the object is and how much attention it receives in the composition. You also need the painting skills to create depth and atmosphere, which requires considerable control of brush strokes.
Finally, you need to be able to pleasingly compose your painting to create mood and lead your viewer to the focal point.
If all this sounds like a lot, it is. But it is also possible to work through all these steps a bit at a time and keep improving to the point where you can create the type of landscapes you've been dreaming of. You just need to be patient and keep practicing all these skills. Read on for some more detailed advice about that.
Draw Everything
Anything you draw will elevate your ability to depict the sorts of objects you will be painting in a landscape. Especially if you focus on learning perspective and shading. Draw household objects, go outside and sketch buildings and trees, and vehicles and people. This might feel like it's taking you away from your goal of drawing landscapes, but drawing a landscape is about drawing all of those things in an arrangement. If you can't draw them on their own, you won't be able to draw them together. So start by drawing whatever you can and increasing your range over time.
Focus on careful observation of your subjects. Learn the rules of perspective. Learn about shading and edges to better depict your subjects. Edges and shape design are crucial to drawing aesthetically pleasing subjects, but also crucial to landscape composition, so you will ultimately benefit from all this practice.
Learning to draw these subjects from different angles and with different lighting will challenge you to better understand these subjects, as will as assisting you in composing objects in your landscape in the future.
Lighting and texture and details and perspective are all vastly complex subjects. You will need to research those subjects in more depth as you start tackling them while you draw. Just be patient and focus on these steps until you can confidently draw any subject from a reference. Learning to draw them from memory can help with understanding these subjects, but it has diminishing returns outside of comic book drawing. Stick with references for the time being, and worry about memory later. Memory will develop over time as you become more familiar with certain subjects.
Everything is a Plane
Once you've spent enough time drawing various subjects, you will start to really understand planes, edges, shading and lighting. You will notice the way every subject can be broken down into a series of plane changes. A portrait of a face consists of a big front plane and a side plane. The front plane has a top plane for the forehead, and a plane sloping downwards for the bridge of the nose and the eyebrows. The nose has a front plane, two side planes and a bottom plane. You get the idea.
These planes will receive light if they face the light source, and varying degrees of shadow if they don't. The sharpness of the plane change will determine how hard the edge transition should be. Texture details will be most noticeable at the edge transitions.
The good news for landscape painting, is that it works the same way. You have planes which face the sun, i.e. flat fields, or mountain faces which angle towards a setting sun. You have planes which receive no light, such as trees which are perpendicular to the ground, or mountain sides in shadow. The line of trees will be most obvious on the side of the mountain as it turns away from the light.
Breaking your landscape into planes and applying principles you have learned from portrait or still life painting will make it much easier to make sense of the overwhelming detail of an image, and allow you to compose your own. Knowledge of perspective will inform how these planes change shape as they recede from the viewer.
Composition
What will take your image from a collection of objects into a pleasing landscape that allows you to linger endlessly is composition. This is where you get to start using your creativity to compose, rather than copying references (although copying reference landscape paintings is also a great way to learn good principles of composition).
Composition is all about controlling where the viewer looks. There are many good guides online about how to create pleasing compositions. The rule of thirds is a common one, as is avoiding dividing your painting down the middle, avoiding too much even symmetry on both sides, using paths and lines to guide the viewer's focus. Look all of these up, observe them in master paintings, and practice thumbnailing to find compositions you like. This is how you develop the language to express the ideas you have.
You can also use a lot of the other principles you've learned up to this point. You will need perspective in order to accurately place the planes of your landscape, as well as to place the various buildings, mountains, trees, vehicles and people.
A lot of the lighting principles used for creating soft lighting are the same principles used for creating soft lighting in portraits as well. You want to scumble in and blend a lot of bright colours around soft edges in the background, and only bring in hard edges at the focal point. Contrasting hard and soft edges is a great way to control the focal point.
Having contrast between lots of detail and very little, between bright light and dark shadow, or between winding and straight lines are other great ways of guiding the viewer's attention. Learn to use all of these to your advantage, and you will see your compositions improve markedly.
Conclusion
Learning to master landscape painting might seem overwhelming at first. You have to learn to paint everything else, then you have to learn all these extra principles on top. But if you start simple by learning perspective and shading, and observing closely enough to draw anything you see, the rest is a matter of technique which just needs to be learned.