Create a Landscape Oil Painting en Plain Air: It's Fun, Challenging, and Will Improve Your Skills as an ArtistWant to leave the limitations of the studio behind? Head outdoors to create a landscape oil painting. You may enjoy the challenge of creating speedy and yet recognizable paintings. Or maybe you are simply tired of painting indoors and want a change of subject matter? Do you love to be in nature?
Whatever reason is, creating a landscape oil painting is a great mental exercise, and it's rewarding too. It can help you recharge and the experience often lends a new energy to your chosen subject matter, whether that is studio figure drawings, figure paintings, still life, or anything at all. Landscape oil painting is a timeless expression of the human experience of nature. The tradition dates back to an earlier era of European painting. It was seen as a way to allow man to contemplate the earth, sky, and trees. The French impressionists took this idea to the ultimate extent, when, taking advantage of the recent development of paints packed in tubes, they ventured outdoors to paint instead of staying in the studio. They often used colors (some of them only newly developed) which were bright and airy, instead of the brown and dark colors of the earlier master painters' works. The term “plein air painting” was coined for this outdoor art—reflecting the French influence. So nowadays it is used to refer to any outdoor landscape painting, but particularly outdoor oil painting since that was the primary medium of most the impressionists used. Making a landscape oil painting outdoors, en plein air, allows close observation of nature's light and colors. It demands both speed and memory to capture fleeting moments.
Once you are “in the field,” you will need to learn
how to capture a simplified “impression” of what you see
in order to cope with the ever-changing light conditions. Stick to this “formula” and you will soon become much more efficient as a painter. You will be amazed at how the quality of your landscape oil paintings will improve. That really is the “secret”of successful plein air painting: simplifying shapes for a good start. Discover what is aerial perspective in landscape painting and read how to paint it. Learn how nature works and create an illusion of distance and space in landscapes. You can learn to paint like Claude Monet. Learn the steps of creating a landscape painting through this demonstration. The success of a painting is determined in the first stage of plotting the major values and shapes of colors in right order. If you use the above general guidelines, you should see a steady progress. Not every painting you do will please you, but doing a lot of these studies will enable you to improve over time. You may surprise yourself!
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