A Landscape Painter’s Guide to Painting Foliage – Easel Talk #56
Transcript and Key Insights
While trees always have foliage, at least in spring and summer, many other landscape elements do as well. There’s a lot of overlap with trees here, but there’s a lot of other just random foliage in the landscape. Just like every other aspect of landscape painting, there are challenges and tips and tricks.
The landscape painters of the past would often indicate little leaves, even into the Hudson River era. Even people like Asher Durand, a brilliant painter who did so many things, just awesome. But breaking those individual leaves out gives you a stultifying effect. Those are beautiful paintings, but you don’t really want to paint individual details.
When the tree is even somewhat distant from you, for the most part you don’t see individual leaves unless you’ve got super acute vision. And even there, you have to pull it in and focus, much like a camera. You can choose to focus your attention on the leaves of a distant object, but it requires deliberate attention. It requires you to pull on the focus. This is something you have to respect as a landscape painter.
To be honest, I can’t remember the last time I painted any kind of individual leaf. I completely subsume leaves and focus on light, mass, color, and texture. More so than texture, I’m thinking brush fracture, brush expression. Foliage is one of the places you can go nuts with that, a couple of dashes here or there that are expressive and you leave alone. John Singer Sargent was a master of the deft and expressive stroke. You could talk about Vincent van Gogh as well, he was a bit more heavy-handed, but there was an appreciation and reverence for the brush stroke itself. Foliage areas of your landscape are a perfect place to express that reverence.
Indicate Your Focus Strategically
It’s important as a landscape painter to always indicate your focus only in areas where you want some focus, where you think the viewer should be dwelling, where your main subject is. Even in a landscape with twenty trees, you need a focal point. You could make a couple of trees or a group of trees that is the focal point.
If the entire scene is in focus, people will apprehend your scene in a manner quite similar to how they perceive reality, scan and pan. You see about this much in detail at any given time, and your brain creates the rest. You have an area of detail and the rest is dropping off. As painters became more sophisticated, they started incorporating that principle into their work. It’s one of the keys to pulling off foliage.
You don’t want people scanning your painting like they would scan a photograph. You really want your whole scene apprehended at once by the viewer, and then they can meander through it and linger on certain aspects they find attractive. The way you convey this quality is through your brush handling and the internal attitude you adopt while painting. Rather than thinking “I’m painting leaves,” think instead: “I’m painting a mass that interacts with light in a particular way.” See how valuable that is?
Mapping Foliage Masses
My foliage masses are mapped out like every other shape in my painting. I work from dark to light after coming up with a map or plan using my underpainting. Even there I’m using the color of the board itself as the light, and I’m just painting the various different values that indicate from shadows to less dark areas.
You always want to do shadows first. When you start doing the landscape itself after painting the sky, always work from darkest to lightest. This is because it’s very much like how we see things, shadows are behind and hidden and underneath brighter things, so it’s a good way to paint as well. You’ll also have a much easier time applying your paint to the board if you work that way.
Injecting Variation
With foliage it’s always important to introduce variation in color. Photographs will limit the range of values and the range of colors, way less than you perceive with your human eyes. As a painter it’s incumbent on you to explode that out and push the value structure. There are at least two or three stops of additional value perception that you have over most photos.
Say you’ve got a mass of leaves overlapping the sky in your photo, it’s just blah old green. Well, it might be an opportunity to modulate that from a cooler green to a warmer orangish tone, while still being perceptually green. Always vary your color, vary your brush strokes, and modulate.
Many times I’ve painted a mass of foliage in the landscape predominantly brown, only to just dab a few other colors in there and it transforms it. Mostly it’s brown with just a few dabs of green, people think it’s green. A few dabs of orange or red and people think it’s orange or red.
Trees Versus Bushes
From my standpoint as a painter, the only difference between a tree and a bush is a trunk. A tree without a trunk is a bush. I don’t care how big it is either.
You might have a mass in your reference that’s just a ball in the distance and you want that to be perceived as a tree. Just work in some kind of trunk. It doesn’t even have to be that big, it just has to be clear. This is a huge tip. I discovered this early on because I started painting in California, and a lot of the California Oaks are like that, beautiful, but no discernible trunks. They’re just big domes on the landscape. This dome problem is a real thing. The great thing about reference is that it gives you moorings for how nature actually functions.
Breaking the Horizon Line
A good rule of thumb is that any element of the landscape that moves above the horizon line is potentially presenting itself as a subject. Mostly we’re talking about trees and foliage here. What doesn’t work for me is the kind of painting where it’s just hills and sky with no trees breaking through. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a good painting of that, I’ve just got a prejudice there.
Sky Holes
Sky holes are an especially challenging aspect of painting and one of the main areas where you’ll see a huge difference in the work of a professional painter, more so, I might say, in a tonalist. One of my big early teachers was Kevin McPherson, but there were paintings he did where his treatment of the sky was too busy, too cluttered, and distracting. The effect you get is what I call the Swiss cheese effect, too many holes, too distracting, and it breaks you out.
One of the major innovations of the tonalists, talking about John Francis Murphy, George Inness, and Charles Warren Eaton, was to decrease the amount of sky holes in the scene. That gives you far more congruence with your foliage.
Err on the side of less. That’s your biggest tip with sky holes. More sky holes breaking through gives you that Swiss cheese effect. It’s better to err on the side of one or two, or none. You’ll notice in my own paintings an increasing reduction in the number of holes over time. Even now, giving you this advice, I’ve been giving it for ten years, I’ll be hanging on to a sky hole, and then you know what, it’s better to let go. I’ve got a painting still on the channel where I remember saying while painting it, “You gotta limit the sky holes, son.” I didn’t limit them enough. Every time I look at that painting I go, I should plug up some of those.
The value trick: Always paint sky holes slightly darker than the sky itself. This is super critical, a tip I got from Kevin McPherson, and it’s commonly expressed by any painting teacher. Your sky is going to be brighter. When you paint that hole, definitely knock it down a couple of stops. It’s a perceptual thing.
The highlight trick: Instead of painting an area as a sky hole, you can paint it as a highlight color in your foliage. Boom. That’s a great tip. When I remember to do it, it’s great.
Edge quality: Sky holes need to be somewhat rough and diffuse. You don’t want them too clean. That same principle of darkness, you need a bit of fuzziness and indistinctness in the sky hole areas. If they’re too sharp or defined, this really increases the Swiss cheese effect. I’ll also use a rubber stamp tool in my graphics program to eliminate sky holes from the reference itself before I start, because anything you can do to that reference image to help stimulate your perception and imagination in the right direction is critical.
Foliage Against the Sky
Where you have foliage coming into the sky, you want to indicate it with a few loose, expressive strokes working wet into wet. You can get real dabby and dashy, that’s a style thing. Think of Camille Pissarro. But Camille Corot preceded Pissarro, and his stuff gets a bit dashy with bigger strokes, more feeling, a greater variance of color, and more congruence with the masses. Corot was one of the pioneers of getting air into the edges of foliage masses. He would work with strokes that were sort of long and dappled, overlapping, with a lot of variance in color, bringing the sky into the foliage and the foliage colors overlapping the sky. The end result is air and light, which is what you want.
My own approach is organic and expressive but not slap-dash. Instead of where Corot might do a hundred dabs, I might do fifty or twenty-five. I bring in that principle of foliage colors going up into the sky and sky colors coming into the foliage, but I don’t get too crazy with it, because then you’ll lack all definition, and you do need that definition.
What I’ve found increasingly is that the more loose and expressive I can be when composing, leaving a lot of the decisions about how those masses will be defined for the actual painting process, the more loose and airy the effect. Not doing too much draftsmanship early in the process is key. You want to find the balance. If you go too far, the foliage presents itself as geometric forms in stark contrast to the lighter sky. I’m always seeking to strike a balance there.
One thing I’ll do now in forest path scenes is bring in a series of dabs into the sky that are slightly darker, maybe a grayer tone than the sky itself, just to break things up and create a kind of refraction effect. That’s been working incredibly well. That’s just refining my process over years, but that’s the place I’ve arrived at in roughly the last six months.
Highlight Areas: The Final Flourish
Highlight areas of foliage elements can be amazing accents that create interest and variety in your work. Try having awareness of this when looking at the reference. It’s definitely good to pump up the saturation and lightness of certain highlight areas, that’s the payoff.
Generally speaking, the sky is going to be, and should be, the brightest thing in any painting you create. There’s a bit of a battle that goes on between the brightness of the sky and the lightness of your lightest highlight areas. You generally don’t want those highlight areas to be brighter than the sky. That’s why you may find yourself going back in and making the sky lighter and brighter to maintain that relationship.
Those areas of more color, light, and saturation are the final flourish that makes your paintings really pop. You may not even notice each one after the painting has all come together, because it should be one congruent effect you’re putting across, but it’s very valuable.
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