All Things Fine Art

Every summer, the subject of how to paint distant trees rears its head and creates frustration for landscape artists in the field. Like everything else in art, there are no formulas to make this pesky subject easy. Whether you live east of the Mississippi with bountiful trees or west of it with mountain ranges, distant backgrounds are a problem for many artists.

Since there are no formulas, I’ll take a stab at offering a few suggestions that can help create reasonably good backgrounds for your next landscape.

1. First and foremost, even when painting from life, the result that counts is the painting, not a disciplined copy of reality. Ultimately, the painting needs to read successfully with harmony and unity. For this to happen, artists must sometimes take artistic license and tweak a value, temperature, or intensity to establish the correct “look” of the background for the painting.
2. The artist’s best friend for finding relationships of value, color temperatures or intensities is the Isolator. If you have a View Catcher the isolator is that hole in the center. Used correctly, peering through that hole will correctly isolate an area of the background to compare it with an isolated area of the foreground. For instance, by comparing pine trees in the background to those in the foreground, the naked eye will see little if any difference in the “green” of the trees. However, the isolator will clearly show the background as a grayer (or bluer) green and lighter in value to those same green trees in the foreground. Finding these subtle variations are highly important to the landscape artist because they give a clue on how to make that background go back in space.
3. The color note (hue, temperature, value and saturation, i.e.: intensity) is not the only way for an artist to imply distance. What about size? A group of trees at the horizon that are near the same height as mid-ground trees/objects will appear close to the middle ground. The opposite is true if the group mass is shorter. The shorter the mass, the more distance is implied. So, along with the tweaking of color, size is an important tool in creating distance as well.
4. A tip I use to create the correct color note for distant trees is to peer through my isolator to determine the basic color of the mass. For instance, it might be green, but more likely it will have a blue or mauve cast to it. That is where I start in laying in my color. Getting the value correct with that first color is important. Again, the isolator can help with that. Next, I mix a warmer color of similar value tweaked slightly lighter to suggest sun striking the trees on the tops and here and there on the sides of a few trees (not every tree). Lastly, a slightly darker note under a few trees will suggest shadows. Trees are not always green. The comparisons as noted here will work for fall, summer, spring or winter trees.
5. Remember, the mass of distant trees are only a support to the idea of the painting. Keep your shapes, marks, and color notes simple. Too much detail, texture, or brushwork will bring unwanted attention to them and conflict with the star of your show.

The Kiss Method is the answer to successful background trees.

Happy summer painting, folks. Perhaps I’ll see you in the field one of these summer mornings.

Sharon