One of my best painting tips, no matter your skill level, is to focus on the big, simple shapes and colors at the start and reserve the more intricate and complex details for later in the painting. When you’re a beginner, you tend to do the opposite: you get lost in the tiny details at the start of the painting and then try to fix the big picture aspects later on. But this is counterproductive. It’s much like building a house—you need to start with a strong foundation and structure before you even think about adding the fancy doorknobs or decorating the living room. The foundation must come first.
My painting, New Zealand, Autumn Colors, is a great demonstration of this idea.
In a sense, it’s a fairly simple landscape with a few trees, a sky, and a path snaking through the middle. But there’s a lot of noise and detail. If I were to try to paint all these details—all the leaves, twigs, branches, rocks, highlights, shadows, shapes, and patterns—I’d easily get overwhelmed. So instead of trying to paint everything, I simplify all the information into a few basic shapes and colors.
The first major shape I see is the foreground in shadow. This is a complex area with all the fall and autumn leaves, each slightly different in shape and color. One approach for painting this area could be to block it all in with a simple flat color and then add all the intricate details later on. But I opt for a more complex approach and jump straight into using multicolored strokes and broken color to pick up some of that color variance.
It’s important to note that simplifying the subject into big, simple shapes and colors doesn’t necessarily mean you have to use simple techniques. It could just be a way for you to break down the subject in your head into something more manageable. Multicolored strokes also make it look like I’m doing a lot more than I am. It’s a surprisingly effective technique to convey a lot of information with only a few strokes.
As I paint all these strokes, I think about it as one shape and try to keep the colors roughly the same in terms of value. There may be some lighter colors and some darker colors here, but I try to keep the average fairly consistent. I then start to block in the trees. I don’t use much variance here; I just use a few colors that broadly represent the trees, and I block in the shapes as simply as I can. I loosely suggest the light and dark areas, but that’s about it.
Next, I map out the light hitting the path. As I do this, I try to make good and accurate strokes, but I’m not worried about making mistakes, as I can easily rework them at this stage of the painting. It’s more important that I paint with confidence. If I try to make everything perfect, my strokes become timid, and everything starts to look a bit too tight and refined. I need to keep my hand relaxed and fluid.
I’m actually not feeling the brushwork here for the path, so I scrape it down and rework it with the palette knife. I also go around and finish off the shapes that represent the trees. The palette knife is particularly effective for the early stages of a painting as it allows you to quickly cover the surface with paint. You can also easily swap between using the knife to add more paint to the surface and using it to scrape paint away. If you flatten out your stroke, you can add paint, and if you go in at a sharper angle, you can scrape it away.
The rich blue sky is woven in between the trees. I simplify it into a few major shapes, trying to ignore any tiny gaps between the leaves or twigs shooting across the sky. I can add these details later. For now, I only care about the big, simple shapes and colors.
At this point, I have a good foundation to work with. All the major shapes and colors are in place. It’s kind of like a no-frills version of the subject. Now I can focus on adding the more intricate details, but I’ll cover that process another time. For now, I just wanted to show you how I go about simplifying the subject and seeing it as big, simple shapes and colors.
This is also something you can practice at any time, even when you’re away from the easel. Just look around and try to see the world as big, simple shapes and colors. See if you can tune out all the noise and information. This is a valuable skill to develop, and it will stick with you for your whole journey.
If you want to learn more, you should check out my Painting Academy course. I’ll walk you through the time-tested fundamentals of painting. It’s perfect for absolute beginner to intermediate painters.
Happy painting!
Dan Scott
