The Landscape Painter’s Guide to Focusing on the Big Shapes – Easel Talk #46

by ixnax · June 13, 2026

Everything in your painting is just shapes. A mountain isn’t an intimidating subject, it’s a large series of triangular shapes subdivided by smaller triangular-type shapes. That odd-looking tree is just a collection of organic shapes. Water, paths, skies, you can paint all of it because the problem isn’t the subject. It’s how you’re seeing it.

Stop Believing You Can’t Paint Certain Things

Many artists starting out say: “I can’t paint skies. I can’t paint trees. I can’t paint paths. I can’t paint water.” You can paint all that stuff. The issue is that you’re not seeing the painting as a painting, a collection of shapes, colors, textures, and values. You’re seeing it as a collection of subjects, difficult subjects to overcome. That’s not the case. You need to flip the script.

Everything portrayed on your two-dimensional painting surface is nothing more than a shape. You have big shapes, little shapes, smooth shapes, sharply pointed shapes, colorful shapes, and dull shapes, bright shapes, and dark shapes. They’re all just shapes.

This is especially powerful if you find yourself having to paint something you’re uncomfortable with. You don’t want to avoid things outright, especially if they’re basic things like skies. Don’t be the artist who hides their hands because they can’t draw them. Hands are just shapes. Draw them.

Your Painting Succeeds or Fails Based on the Big Shapes

Your painting will succeed or fail based on the harmony and balance of your large shapes. If you’re struggling with painting landscape, pull it back. Forget about the details you’ve finally figured out, how to paint leaves, ripples on a pond, pebbles on gravel.

These things are well and good, but the main thing you want to teach yourself, especially starting out, is how to design your painting and make a pleasing arrangement of shapes. Start with the big shapes, which are then subdivided by smaller shapes.

Before you start a scene, identify the big shapes: Is there a path? That’s a big shape. Is there a sky? That’s a big shape. What’s the main tree mass, and how are they organized? Those are big shapes. Get those right, and you do nice color modulations with good values. You have a painting right there. You don’t even need to do any of the details.

So much of the emotional content of the scene is going to be conveyed through the compositional structure, the value relationships, and the color. The detail is nice, it’s gravy. But if you get the big shapes right, people will accept that as a painting and appreciate it and enjoy it.

The Detail Problem: Over-Cluttering Your Work

Many amateur artists, even some surprisingly successful professional artists, over-clutter their work with an endless array of details. This is usually a byproduct of working with photographic reference. The camera captures and delineates everything in the scene equally. A distant tree branch has the same importance as a foreground element. It’s all just captured mechanically.

When you’re starting out, you don’t really know where to put the emphasis. As you make paintings, bad ones and good ones, you start saying, “I know where I went wrong there. I got all hung up on a bunch of details, and I didn’t have the big shapes laid in properly.”

If you’re struggling, the real thing for you to do is pull it all back. Forget about the detail. Forget about your style. Style is something that skips over the top. If you’re making an artificial version of “this is my style,” you’re putting the cart before the horse. If you’re starting out, you don’t have style. You don’t need a style. No one cares about your style. You need to be focused on creating pleasing compositions with good colors and values.

Details will never save a painting that’s failing because of bad composition or poor arrangement of the shapes and forms.

Practice Design, Not Masterpieces

You would be better off doing 10 little underpainting-type sketches in a day when you’re starting out than trying to do your masterpiece. Get a canvas pad and do three or four different versions of the scene you want to paint, just with one color, very quickly, very small. Focus on enjoying the designing process. That’s what’s going to carry the day.

How to See the Big Shapes

How do you develop your ability to focus on these big shapes? If you wear glasses, take them off, everything becomes shapes without the edges and delineation. If you have perfect vision, you can squint. I’m not the only painter that’s talked about that. A lot of painters will lay that on you because it’s pretty vital.

Work with it yourself and see what you can do. It’s not as important to squint as it is to know that you must focus on the shapes. When you catch yourself thinking, “I can’t paint trees,” replace it with the concept of shapes. It’s just another shape. You’ve got a whole bunch of shapes. It’s just treated as a shape. And you’re going to be free.

The Tonalist Approach: Simplified Masses

Every masterpiece you’ve ever admired is a thoroughly arranged collection of shapes. The toneless approach particularly embraces this perspective, focusing on the poetic arrangement of simplified masses rather than photographic detail. If you train yourself to think this way and work this way, you’re going to be moving much more rapidly. You’re going to get out of the weeds and into the vast plain of mastery, painting mastery, because this is very fundamental stuff.

Train yourself to see this way, and you’ll find there’s not much that you can’t paint.

M Francis McCarthy, Your Painter in Residence