When Landscape Painters Should Think Like a Still Life Artist

If you're new to ArtistsNetwork, you'll want to take a moment to become familiar with the guest blog posts of Johannes Vloothuis, an art instructor who rose to popularity through his friendly, candid guidance in our online forums. I'm honored to share with you his advice, which you can also find through his Landscape Painting Essentials series, at North Light Shop, and in the ArtistsNetwork eBook club. ~Cherie

Think Like a Still Life Artist by Johannes Vloothuis

In our macro world the brain has its own built-in mechanism that perceives three-dimensional reality. We can give a rough estimate of how far things recede into the distance. It doesn't matter where the sun is positioned. Even if the light is perfectly lighting up the frontal plane on an object, we still perceive it to be three-dimensional. Field depth is never questioned in the real world.

As artists we don't have this luxury. We're faced with the need to manipulate forms so they convey a three-dimensional illusion on a two-dimensional surface. If we don't know any better and we take a photograph of a scene, which flattens the entire scene into two dimensions, we may easily fall into the mistake of painting a mountain as it appears in the photograph. The day may be cloudy or the sun may be positioned in such a way that only one plane gets the light. We need to think like still life artists who generally show a height, width and depth to objects, allowing one side of fruits and other objects to appear in shadow and the opposite side in highlight.

This notion can be equally applied to landscape objects. If you think in terms of spheres (example: treetops), cylinders (example: tree trunks), cubes (example: rocks) and cones (example: evergreens), as much as you can, you'll remember to render a shadow side and a highlight to the shapes so you end up with the illusion of three-dimensional forms.

The illusion of three dimensions in the above painting is much more convincing than the illusion dimensionality in the photo, in spite of the fact that the camera is more accurate at capturing details. If you look at the mountains carefully, you'll see that they're rendered in somewhat pyramidal shapes with a highlighted side, a midvalue side and a darker side. Also, atmospheric perspective plays a role. ~Johannes Vloothuis

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Article credit: Cherie Haas
Online Editor, Artists Network
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