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Landscape Painting Techniques

Saptakee Sengupta
Painting landscapes is a great way to give a boost to your artistic skills. Here are the best landscape painting techniques that you can adopt to. Read on to know.
Landscape painting is probably the most versatile form of art, where every element of nature can be portrayed with perfection. It's the best way to represent nature and one's perception about nature.
While nature is symbolic of God's creation of something pure and eternal, it can simultaneously form a medium for depicting the darker side of human intervention with nature.
Landscapes are basically painted with crayons, oil paints, watercolors and acrylic paints. Thus, you can utilize your skills in the best possible way when you are well acquainted with these painting techniques. Here are the different styles of landscape paintings, with the basic techniques as the main subject.

Starting With Oil Pastels

Kids usually find handling crayons easy for painting landscapes. Also known as oil pastels, they can be used to create a perfectly smooth painting. Beginners can sketch the elements of nature with a pencil and then fill colors with crayons.
Rivers, land and the sky are shaded smoothly while trees, rocks and mountains could be painted in random fashion. Apply light colors as the base coat and then try the blending technique to bring out differential effects. Landscapes painted with oil pastels must have a uniform look and to achieve perfection you have to use the crayons in a sliding motion.
Extra objects, like boats, humans, birds, etc., are emphasized with darker shades that must complement the overall drawing. Once you get well acquainted with the basics, you can utilize other tools like kneaded erasers, brushes, cotton swabs and tortillons to make the painting more creative and natural.

Shifting to Water Colors

Originality is the most vital attributes of a landscape painting. You can apply colors directly with a paint brush where sketching outlines with a pencil is not required. Form an image of the picture you want to draw and give it an accurate form with your painting skills.
Mix the color with water to get the desired consistency. Use a flat brush to incorporate colors into natural bodies. Colors blend well with water in proper proportions. And this needs practice. For example, if you have imagined a storm with gray clouds and trees drooping low under the power of wind, then shades of gray, white and black should be used.
Clouds should merge well with the sky and the effect of the storm is best depicted by some devastated elements. On the other hand, you can use a wide range of colorful shades for demonstrating the freshness of nature. Thus, watercolors are a great medium to make a landscape painting look perfectly natural.

Trying Acrylics on Canvas

Though canvas is the best substrate for acrylics, you can try it on ordinary paper, plastic and glass. Painting nature with acrylics adds an edge to your artistic skills. Landscapes painted with acrylics look more natural and lifelike than watercolors.
Perfection is added by glazing specific parts of an object. How? Imagine a trunk of a banyan tree, which is standing in close association with trunks of other trees. When you make the main trunk of the banyan tree more distinct, then it would obviously look more sensuous. So certain sections of the trunk are glazed with the help of translucent paints.
Acrylics are also used for creating different textures to landscapes by using opaque colors with subtlety. Painting landscapes with acrylics needs immense practice to get a grip of the right procedures. The paints are quick drying and therefore use a more diluted paint to begin with.

Choice of Oil Colors

Oil colors, when applied well, infuse life into a painting. Landscapes with oil colors is difficult if you don't know the correct blending methods. Use turpentine or linseed oil to blend colors and the brush depends on the nature (sharpness and depth) of the object you are painting.
White color is highly used for highlighting objects, shading different portions and adding differential effects. Oil painting knives are used to create dry textures like barks of tress, surface of land, walls of building, monuments, etc. You can study famous landscape paintings with oil colors over the Internet and analyze how colors have been implemented.
You will enjoy painting landscapes with oil colors once you get to know the techniques properly. Oil painting is such a versatile medium, that you can easily rectify your errors on a canvas with the help of the oils used. Landscapes painted with oil paints have a lively approach that is unique and completely distinct from other mediums of painting.
Whether you are using oil pastels, watercolors, acrylics or oil paints, always aim towards achieving perfection. All these techniques can be utilized for painting abstract landscapes as well. Landscape painting is something that cannot be taught, rather you have to be imaginative and creative to express your thoughts on the canvas in the best possible way.