A Landscape Painter’s Guide to Strategic Color Placement – Easel Talk #57
Transcript and Key Insights
The difference between a painting that feels alive and one that feels flat often comes down to strategic color placement. You have your basic composition, your framework of the landscape, that’s absolutely critical. But you don’t need to constantly reinvent new structures. A solid composition like the big mass, little mass approach works fine as a foundation. What can elevate a painting is how you handle color.
Think of it like pop songs: many stick to the same chord progressions and linear melodies, but they grab you with different textures and sound events. Paintings work the same way. Every part affects every other part, much like life itself. Knowing where and how to place color strategically can transform an ordinary scene into something transcendent.
Red Is Your Secret Weapon
Of all the tools in your arsenal, red is the most effective for landscape painting. The real issue with landscape painting is the obvious one: green, green, green. Everything is green. You can’t just paint it like that. A lot of painters have done all-green paintings, George Inness comes to mind, and Charles Warren Eaton, but they didn’t make a habit of it. For the most part, red in all its forms is needed to complement, accent, and play off the greens.
The interesting thing is what you see on the palette doesn’t always match what appears on the canvas. You’ll mix something that looks reddish-brown on your palette, but when you put it on the painting, it reads as green. This happens constantly, and it’s important to understand when mixing.
I typically start with Mike’s green, a combination of PY 74 Acrylide yellow, and ivory black. It’s a warm, earthy green with plenty of versatility. That’s why it’s perfect for landscape painting. Without thinking much about it, I’ll take that green and mix in burnt sienna (or nowadays, transparent red iron oxide). The transparent versions of burnt sienna (Red iron oxide) are particularly helpful because you can add a lot without creating chalkiness. It just brings in that reddish warmth you need when dealing with green everywhere in the landscape.
If you examine actual foliage closely, you’ll see it’s not uniform. Photos compress everything into a wall of simplified color, but real foliage has vibrant new growth alongside dead, decaying, brown-red sections. There are always various stages of growth and decay present. The color dynamism comes from playing red against green, as they’re complementary colors on the color wheel.
Where to Place Red: Strategic Opportunities
The practical question is: where do you actually put this red? You can start by being random. Look at your reference and identify areas that are all predominantly green. Then pick a section and decide to make it red or brown in your painting. That’s the whole point of strategic color placement.
Grass is an obvious place. It’s can be boring in photos, often it’s a poisonous, icky green that’s too uniform for your painting. Use the subdivision rule (from our previous talk on ‘Painting Nothing’: randomly throw in tan, brown, or red, then reconcile it as you paint along. This can give you interest in an otherwise boring area. People won’t question it. They’ll interpret it as weeds or just accept it as part of the scene. Sometimes you have to get a little lost to get found.
With foliage, when you’re painting a copse of trees and the reference shows green, green, green, pick one tree and make it red or brown. It doesn’t have to be a dead tree, maybe it’s a different variety or reacting to the environment differently. You’re creating interest through strategic color placement. BTW I generally avoid the cliché of the red barn in the green landscape.
The Hue Shift Technique
Here’s a huge tip: keep the value the same for adjacent areas in your painting while shifting the hue. Every color has both a value structure (light, dark, or medium) and a hue (green, red, yellow, purple, etc.). You can create interest for example; by shifting from a medium green to a medium red, thus the hue changes, but the value doesn’t. This prevents the intense contrast shifts that would normally grab attention where you don’t want it while creating interest.
I do this in skies all the time. Next to the blue of the sky I’ll bring in a gray of similar value near the cloud edges. You see the hue shift without the value contrast which creates a nice feeling of ‘air’ in that case.
The Red Dot Strategy: A Finishing Technique
This is a technique I use often, though not in every painting. Once your scene is done, mix a rich chromatic red, I prefer actual cadmium red combined with burnt sienna or umber for opacity and punch. Then randomly dab these red dots around the painting.
This creates vibration in your work. It’s subtle and powerful. Most viewers won’t realize you’ve strategically placed red dots in the green landscape, but it works. It mirrors reality, in actual landscapes, we’re constantly tuning out little spots of various colors. Photography compresses everything, reducing the color and value range.
Be careful not to overdo it. Too many red dots/dashes and people think you’re painting flowers. You want pizzazz, not distraction. It’s not the kind of technique that makes a painting on its own, but it’ll take a good painting and make it better. That’s how you create masterful work, by stacking minor achievements until they become major acomplishments.
Naturalistic Versus Synthetic Color
Color is personal. I don’t expect anyone to paint like I paint. Your own sensibilities will emerge the more you work, and that’s what defines style, with enough experience you develop your own identity around color, especially regarding how you balance naturalistic and synthetic approaches.
Vincent van Gogh is the master of synthetic color. He was stimulated by natural landscapes but willing to push his color toward synthesis. The new pigments available in his time gave him the ability to do this as did his constant striving to express how the landscape made him feel.
Personally, I don’t care what color something really is. I care more about my emotional response to the reference image and expressing that on my panel. I might shift colors before I even paint, experimenting with different color casts in my referenceto stimulate my imagination. The reference image isn’t a work of art itself, it’s just another tool.
If color feels mysterious to you, I suggest you pull back to a limited palette. My favorite is cadmium yellow, cadmium red, phthalo blue or Prussian blue, ivory black, and titanium white. Struggle with this palette to mix what you see. It’ll be frustrating, but you’ll build in harmony immediately. When you add more colors, I’d suggest yellow ochre and burnt sienna first, then maybe phthalo green or permanent green light.
Understanding color comes through experience and mixing. After a while, you build a repertoire. When a color you need to mix comes up again, you will know what to do. That’s why I often automatically throw burnt sienna into my Mike’s green. I just know it will work.
Color and Composition: The Mosaic Approach
Think of your painting as tiles or mosaics of color. This is helpful conceptually, though when executing paintings, I tend to use a natural approach with soft, diffused edges rather than hard color blocks. However, you can do studies using just chunks of color next to each other, it’s a very valuable practice.
Also consider the paint-by-numbers framework. Those kits divided scenes into numbered chunks filled with specific colors. It’s a useful way to think dividing the picture up into discrete areas filled with color, especially when starting out. It’s like training wheels for learning to paint.
Area-Specific Color Strategies
Sky: Color placement should be subtle and soft but always present. Create distinct areas of different colors. You might bring purple, taupe, or orangey tones into gray clouds. As you move toward light areas, consider yellow or orange. You can use complementary colors too, orange against blue creates that intense sunset effect. The key is knowing when to dial you color back with white or raw umber.
Clouds: Play with cool-to-warm shifts. Purples and blues in the darker cool areas versus burnt sienna and orange in the mid-tone and highlight ranges. It’s still reads as gray perceptually, but you’re creating more interest through strategic placement.
Ground plane: This is often an area full of nothing, perfect for applying different bits of color randomly. Boring areas are where you can experiment. Throw in red, then maybe dob green over it. So it becomes integrated but different and more unique than the usual uniform green-on-green.
The Goal: Creating Transcendence
The purpose of landscape painting is creating transcendence, taking people somewhere else entirely. When someone looks at your work and appreciates it, they’re seeing the way you see. It’s magical. Strategic color placement is one of your most powerful tools for achieving this.
Take good care of yourself. Stay out of trouble. And fight the power.
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