How to Paint Landscapes: 5 Tips for Beginner Oil Painters

Landscapes can seem like an overwhelming subject for beginner artists, what with so much detail and variety to tackle. You might feel like you don't even know where to start! That’s why I’ve put together these landscape tips to help simplify the process and allow you to approach your paintings with more confidence. You'll be able to break the painting process down into manageable steps and focus on what's really important without getting bogged down in the details.

By the way, if you’d like to see these tips in action, I've also made a YouTube video where I demonstrate each step while working on a landscape painting of Vienna's beautiful Kahlenberg hills. Feel free to check it out:

1. Don’t Start with a White Canvas

Getting rid of the white of the canvas before you start painting can be a game-changer. While there’s nothing wrong with starting with a white canvas, you’d be missing out on the advantages that a toned canvas can provide. Toning your canvas—i.e. covering it with a flat colour—can make a world of difference. This simple step not only saves you time but also gives you a head start before you’ve even picked up your brush.

There's more than one reason why it’s worth a try:

1. It helps you quickly establish your values. The tone of the canvas essentially acts as a mid-tone, so all you need to do is find your lightest lights and darkest darks, and you will have a foundation for your painting.

2. It ties things together. A toned canvas can create a sense of balance and unity, especially if you let some of it peek through your brushstrokes.

3. It can help you establish a mood for your painting. Warm tones create a cosy atmosphere, while cooler tones like blue or grey can lend a calm or sombre feel. For my recent painting of the Vienna Woods, which you'll see in the examples throughout this article, I toned the canvas with some Burnt Sienna. Not only does it add warmth, but it’s also green’s complementary colour, creating a subtle colour vibration that will make the painting more interesting.

Adding a warm tone your canvas will help tie the composition together and add warmth to the painting, creating a cozy atmosphere.

How to Tone a Canvas: Two Approaches

Typically, I would use one of the following methods when toning my canvas:

1. Tint your gesso with some acrylic paint when you're priming your painting surface and leave it to dry for 24 hours.

2. Alternatively, apply a thin layer of oil paint mixed with some solvent and wipe off the excess with a paper towel (see the photo above). This method works best if you're short on time because you can start painting without having to wait until the tone dries completely.

   
   

2. Focus on Large Shapes

When you’re painting a landscape, especially if you’re outside doing a plein air painting, you might get overwhelmed by the variety and abundance of detail around you. The trick is to simplify. Your goal shouldn’t be to reproduce what you see exactly as you see it. It would be impossible to paint all of the little details anyway. The goal rather is to produce an interpretation of what you see by simplifying the scene and grouping separate objects into large shapes. For example, instead of painting every leaf, tree, or blade of grass, focus on grouping them into masses. Trust me, this will make your painting look better. That’s because when there’s too much going on, the viewer gets overwhelmed and doesn’t know where to rest their eyes.

Learning to “see in shapes” is an important skill for landscape painters. It helps establish a clear structure, a backbone for your painting, that produces a profound visual effect. The more simple the design, the more clear and coherent your piece is going to look.

Simplifying Your Landscapes

• Squint at your reference to blur out the details and focus on the larger forms. If you wear glasses, like me, you can take them off for a similar effect.

• Try to keep your painting to six or seven main shapes. Any more than that, and you risk overcomplicating your composition.

In my Kahlenberg Hills painting, I grouped the elements into six shapes: the foreground tree, the sky, the clouds, the hills, the grapevines, and the grass. This helped create a clear and balanced composition.

Break your composition down into large shapes for greater clarity.

3. Limit Your Values

Value—how light or dark a colour is—forms the foundation of any painting. Values are at the basis of our vision and perception, and they’re the main tool that helps us differentiate between different shapes. Now, the problem is that you’re looking at a photo reference, or you’re out on location, you’ll see an infinite number of values. That’s not very helpful because you not only want to have clearly defined value zones but also limit the number of values that you use in your painting. In landscapes, limiting your values can simplify the composition and make it easier to group objects.

Tips for Value Control

• Start by creating a value plan, meaning that you want to try to group things that have more or less the same value. They don’t have to be the same colour or exactly the same value, but you need to make sure that the modulations within one value zone aren’t extreme to the point of breaking the unity of that zone. This ensures that your painting feels cohesive rather than fragmented.

• Decide how much of the value scale you want to use. Keep in mind that your lightest light doesn’t always have to be white, and your darkest dark doesn’t have to be black. Compressed values can be a great tool with which you can create interesting mood and atmosphere. For instance, in the painting of the Kahlenberg Hills, my darkest darks were around an 8 on the value scale.

4. Use Atmospheric Perspective

Atmospheric perspective is something you inevitably have to consider when you’re painting landscapes. Usually, we think of air as completely transparent, which might be true for things that are right in front of us, but with faraway objects, you start to see the atmosphere.

As things move further away from us and into the distance, three things happen:

1. Value contrast softens. Faraway objects become lighter in value. For example, I kept the foreground tree darker and more detailed than the background hills in the example below.

2. Colours lose warmth. Distant elements often shift towards cooler hues and become less yellow. Some artists simplify this by making the faraway objects bluer in hue. That's why, in my painting, the field became greyer and less yellow as it receded, and the background hills took on a bluish tint.

3. Detail decreases. To bring the foreground tree forward, I made it the most detailed part of the painting, while the background church is only suggested with a few brushstrokes.

   
   

As objects recede into the distance, they’re affected by the atmospheric perspective, which makes them appear lighter, cooler, and less detailed.

5. Choose a Focal Point

Every landscape needs a focal point. When the viewer looks at your painting, what is the first thing you want them to see? What is the “main idea” of your painting? As painters, we have the power to lead the viewer’s eye with certain cues. Together they make up a hierarchy of focal points. For example, with this painting, I wanted the viewer to first see the tree and then let the rows of grapevines take them to the hills and the white church. The tree is my primary focal point and the church is a secondary focal point. Together, they create a natural flow that leads the viewer’s eye across the scene.

Ways to Establish a Focal Point

There are several ways you can make your focal point stand out, and all of them rely on contrast:

• Value contrast: The sharpest light-dark contrast draws attention.

• Shape contrast: Unique shapes stand out against repetitive patterns.

• Hue contrast: A red poppy in a green field will instantly attract the eye.

• Saturation contrast: The most intense and pure colour will dominate the scene.

• Edge contrast: Sharp edges catch the eye, especially among softer edges .

• Texture contrast: A textured object will stand out on a smooth surface.

• Human presence: People, buildings, or other man-made objects naturally draw our attention in a landscape; our eyes are trained to notice them. So, if you put a hut in the middle of a forest, it will inevitably become a focal point.

  
  

One thing you want to avoid is having every piece of painting jump out at the viewer and fight for their attention. That’s just going to confuse and overwhelm them. Try to choose one or more of these contrast tools to help you highlight your “main idea” to give your viewer a starting point from which they will follow your composition.

The final result of applying these tips.

Conclusion

These are my top 5 tips that I try to keep in mind when painting landscapes. I think that if you try to apply them to your paintings, you will have a solid foundation and can create a great piece. I hope that these techniques will help you simplify the process and imbue your paintings with more visual impact.