Education and Inspiration

Before the first daub of paint is squeezed out of the tube and brush is put to canvas, many plein-air painters have already set themselves up for failure. How? By selecting a site that doesn’t translate well into painting. Just because a scene is beautiful or interesting doesn’t necessarily make it a good subject for painting. There are many conditions that can be met to help maximize your ability to translate the scene from the real world to a two dimensional canvas.

I began painting directly from nature after college. My first efforts were disappointing, however. I knew how to draw and paint well, but when I painted outside nothing seemed to work as it had in the studio. The paintings lacked depth and life. Only after several seasons of trial and error did I realize that I was “setting up” my subject improperly. I was picking subjects that did not have clear patterns of light and shade to define form, or were without the spatial cues that positioned those forms in front of and in back of each other.

All artists work with these cues, but in plein-air painting, finding them is often a matter of putting oneself in the right place at the right time.

The Light Upon the Scene
Being at the right place. Nature is always beautiful. All you have to do is find a scene you like. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were always that simple! Because of our keen depth perception, every scene appears three-dimensional. But not every scene presents its depth in a way that the artist requires. Remember, three-dimensionality in painting and drawing is always an illusion. So we look for sites that present the visual cues we need to bring depth into our “flat” two-dimensional paintings.

Try to orient yourself as close to 90° from the angle the sun is striking the subject, so as to get the best view of cross light and shadow patterns. Here’s a trick I always use: stand facing the sun. Then raise your arms so your body forms a "T." The direction your arms point are the two best directions from which to select your site, give or take. Avoid painting with the sun directly behind you or directly in front of you.

Where the sun is. Because the sun is lower in the sky in the morning and in the late afternoon, the light-side and shadow-side of forms are more clearly defined and noticeable. These are ideal times to paint. At midday the defining shadows are diminished. Trees are likely to be top lit and cast shadows are at a minimum. If you rely on these diminished cues, it will be harder to find the form and structure you need. While your depth perception allows you to always perceive reality as three-dimensional, there won’t be any such depth perception in your painting unless you put it there.

In the spring and summer, any time after sunrise to about 10 a.m. is ideal. The sun is lower in the sky, cross lighting forms in the landscape with defining shadows. If you like to sleep in, you can catch the crisp shadows a little later, in the afternoon, beginning at 3 or 4 p.m. and as late as 8 p.m. Of course, these times vary depending on the season and your latitude.Depending on where you live, winter can be an ideal season, as well (if you can stand painting with your mittens on!). Not only does winter offer a unique palette of colors, the sun is always lower in the sky, never directly overhead, so it casts desirable patterns of light and shade throughout the day.

This scene offers some luscious colors, even some suggestion of a foreground, middle-ground and background. At midday, however, defining shadows are scarce.

Where you are. Even if you paint at these times, you can still position yourself so that you won’t be able to take advantage of the light patterns! Even in the morning or late afternoon, you can sit with the sun directly behind you or directly in front of you. Your subject becomes entirely backlit or front-lit, which hides the shadows altogether! Where the sun will be. Pay attention to where the sun is headed. Say you’ve found a sunny spot filled with interesting shadows. Is the sun just over the top of that building or tree? Is it going to disappear in ten minutes? If so, all your interesting shadows will disappear with it. By the same token, is the sun about to come up from out from behind a tree or building, changing the light and color structure of your entire scene?

The Light Upon Your Painting
How many times have you found a great site, but couldn’t escape from the sun splashing right down on you and your painting? Site selection also involves making sure that the light on you and your painting doesn’t work against you.

Avoid placing your palette or canvas in direct sunlight. Direct sunlight on your canvas or palette can be very deceptive. The colors appear intensely brilliant and saturated, but are actually very distorted. Sunlight is not a normal viewing light; it is simply too bright. See Figure 1 below. When you bring that painting back into the studio, you’ll see a big difference.

Make sure the palette and canvas receive equal light. A color appears different under lights of different brightness. An awareness of this is crucial to the painter, especially when working outdoors, where the light cannot be controlled. Imagine your difficulty if every time you mixed a color and applied it to the canvas, it appeared either darker or lighter than you intended. You’d spend all your time trying to compensate for the difference. This is exactly the problem you’ll face if the light on the canvas and palette is not “equalized” as shown in Figure 1. Figure 2 shows the worst possible arangement. The palette is sunstruck while the canvas is in shadow (or vice versa). The imbalance in brightness will make mixing the colors you want almost imposible.

Working in the shade. Whenever possible, try to work from a softly shaded spot. Figure 3. Under a tree or in the cast shadow of a building, for example, is ideal. It gives a soft, diffuse light that keeps the light on the canvas and palette relatively equal. In terms of brightness, soft shade is also closer to indoor light.

Working in full sunlight. If a softly shaded spot is not accessible, you may have no choice but to work under direct sunlight. A beach umbrella with a clamp that attaches to your easel is the easiest way to handle this. It allows you to make your own shade wherever you choose to paint. Keep in mind that umbrellas are translucent; if the umbrella is brightly colored, you can get a strong color cast over the painting. If you don’t use an umbrella, the only other alternative—and much trickier one—is shown in Figure 4. Atop this hill in eastern Washington, there was no escaping the sun. I managed to get shade on my palette and canvas by turning the easel so the canvas cast a shadow on the palette. I also propped some cardboard behind the canvas to block any stray light.

Design and composition
Obviously, finding patterns of light and shade that model the form are only one part of site selection. Such patterns are not always available in the landscape, nor are they always the effect we desire. When the traditional or obvious means for ordering space are not apparent the painter relies more heavily on other spatial cues. We will “design on the fly” and recompose the space as needed. This could be the subject of an entire book, but there are quite a few things we can look for to help us maintain a sense of space and structure in addition to modeling form.

1. Pick scenes that present overlapping forms of varying shapes and sizes. Elements overlapping one another (part of their shape is obscured) and elements varying in size (scale) tell us whether something is in front or back, near or far. This is true in the real world, and needs to be equally true in the illusory world of your painting, where there is no real depth perception. See if you can find forms that diminish in size as they recede. This is a clear cue for space and distance. If it helps, see the site as a still life. Certain fruits are in front of other fruits. Fruits in the back look smaller. Tree tops, hills, houses—all the elements in the landscape—can be seen this way.

2. Does the site have some “built in” linear perspective? You do not have to be an architect or draftsman to find vanishing points or understand linear perspective. A road, a path, a stream, or a series of trees or hills that recede at even a slight angle as it moves away from you can be all that’s needed.

3. There’s a host of pretty scenes that make for difficult subjects. Strips of landscape that run directly parallel to your field of vision can be problematic. They often lack distinguishing near and far reference points. For example, a row of trees that sits on the horizon line, or a distant shore that is perfectly horizontal to your field of vision. On the other hand, these types of scenes are ideally suited to back lighting or front lighting (sunrises and sunsets), in which dramatic color effects are the main event.

4. Be conscious of large, shapeless masses, like a group of treetops. They can become an indistinguishable mass of foliage and limbs, especially if they are your entire composition. For such areas to work you must be able to find patterns within the mass to define its structure, or surround it with other forms/patterns/colors that can define it.

5. Look for shapes and patterns that define the space. Even a picture without classical cross light will still use differences in value to define itself. In these subjects, the differences in value are used more to distinguish between broad shapes than to model actual forms. The backlit sunset for example, frequently uses silhouetted shapes to create different levels of space.

Pick a subject that moves you. This final bit of advice may seem obvious, but I have found that when a subject really excites me, I am able to do more with less. There have been many times when conditions were working against me, but because of my inspiration, I was able to overcome the limitations and pull off a successful painting. I was forced to see the picture in a new way: I focused on some effect—a heightened color, a pattern, or an unusual cropping—that did for the composition what the traditional cues could not.

The real world. In a perfect world, we would find sites that give us all the cues and visual order we want. But in fact, it’s unlikely you’ll ever find sites that meet all the conditions described here. You shouldn’t expect to, either. The goal is to know what to look for, and use as many cues as you can find to ensure the greatest degree of success.

Plein-air painting is as much about creativity and vision as it is about selecting sites that work for you. Ultimately, plein air painting is a combination of working with what the landscape clearly reveals, and what it does not. At times, your choices will be limited and you must paint whatever is available or not paint at all. Then you must call on your ability as an artist to see things differently. It’s easy to select a subject when it immediately reveals something beautiful to you. It is much more difficult to see the mundane in a new way, to find beauty when there appears to be none. The ability to extract beauty and order from disorder is the heart of the plein air painter’s experience, and ss your selection, design and compositional abilities grow, you will find yourself doing more with less.