Optimal Conditions for Site Selection The Relationship Between Value and Color Analogous Harmony & the Envelope of Light Value Divisions in Landscape Painintg CLASSES MASTERS |
Landscape’s final frontier — clouds and skies Clouds and skies are perhaps the most overlooked and under-examined component of the landscape. All too often artists simply reduce skies to an uninteresting, flat backdrop. When the sky is cloudless it is seemingly without any structure, and when there are clouds, they appear vague and indecipherable. Thus, artists are hard put to treat their skies as a fully dimensional subject. In fact, they have as much depth and volume as the land does. Understanding cloud forms Nowhere in landscape is structure and volume harder to observe than in clouds. Their shapes are irregular and their edges can range from vague to nonexistent. Making sense of clouds is essentially a process of extraction—sifting through the ambiguity to the underlying structure.
EXERCISE: Drawing planes and edges. Although clouds are soft and amorphous, it is lines and edges that are the key to analyzing their form. If you’ve ever studied figure drawing, the process is similar to the way a figurative artist breaks down the curvilinear, organic forms into their most essential, geometric planes. Planes may seem too strong a word to be applied to clouds, but they are indeed present! Begin with a drawing of the cloud(s) as a strict line drawing. The goal is to translate shapes into planes wherever you can. The key to this approach is a varying line weight. Darker lines correspond to the outlines of the overall cloud mass (A), while lighter lines correspond to the secondary masses and the transitions between light and shadow portions of the cloud itself (B). Sometimes a very light, soft-edged transition in the cloud must be exaggerated as a sharper line to bring out the separation between planes. (C). In other places, subtle contour lines show where the planes turn (D). Distant cloud shapes, which are clearly secondary (behind the main cloud mass), are suggested with very light lines (E). Lastly (and trickiest to see), overlapping forms are empahsized by slightly darkening a line at the small juncture where it tucks behind another form (F).
Skies |
