A Landscape Painter’s Guide to Painting Rocks – Easel Talk #60
Transcript and Key Insights
Painting rocks can be an exceptionally difficult aspect of landscape painting. This particular challenge seems to be especially thorny for many artists. Just about any painting done by an amateur painter is going to have problems with the rocks. Maybe you’ve even avoided rocks in your paintings because of the problems that crop up. But I’ve got tips for you that are going to be very beneficial. Let’s go.
Too Many Rocks
Painting rocks can be an exceptionally difficult aspect of landscape painting. The first problem I see constantly: you’ve got too many rocks. This happens because your reference has too many rocks, or nature is giving you too many rocks. But placement and quantity are critical compositional decisions, you can’t just start stabbing things in and hoping for the best. Don’t paint every rock in the reference. Cut it back.
Too Few Rocks
There’s also the opposite problem: just one or two rocks calling an inordinate amount of attention to themselves. If there are just a couple of rocks in your reference, you could decide not to paint them at all, or have a strategy about what you’re going to do.
Rocks Too Big or Too Small
Rocks can get oversized because they’re not easy to paint. When you focus on something and give it attention, it can grow. You can get proud of a beautifully painted rock formation while the rest of the painting drops off. If rocks appear massive in your reference, scale them down or eliminate them. The best way to get good at painting rocks is to paint them, make studies in a sketch pad and apply yourself so when rocks come up in a scene, you have some idea how to approach them.
The opposite problem: rocks too small and weird. Think of composition like this: two big elements with a small element. That works better than this. Generally you have some big rocks with a few small rocks around them. Always think of them in relationship to other objects in the landscape.
Form, Texture, and the Balance Problem
Rocks are often painted too angular and sharp, like crystal formations, or too rounded, like potatoes. You don’t want to look like jutty, sharp crystals pulling attention to themselves. Big round potatoes is another problem. Strike a balance between too angular and too round.
Color Approaches
Rocks are gray. But what is gray? It’s a lot of different things. You could have a blue gray, a brown gray, a reddish gray. There are many different colors that work for rocks, gray, brown, blue, pink, white, or even black. Predominantly, you’re working with some sort of gray tone.
Like the sky, it’s often helpful to offset cool grays against warm grays. That creates interest without being distracting, especially if it’s a shift in hue rather than a shift in value.
Rocks often have moss growing on them, so splash them with green. Sometimes they’re rusty with metal in them, so add red. Do this in a way that cooperates with the rest of your painting. The number one problem with rocks is that they call too much inordinate attention to themselves compared to other items in the landscape, and they’re usually not the subject.
Change things up and use rocks as an opportunity to inject different color and interest into those landforms. Don’t paint them some boring gray in one color only. Use value shifts to modulate from dark to light.
Value and Contrast
Another issue I often observe: the contrast with rocks is too pronounced. Your shadows are too dark and your highlights are too light. Pull that back, but not so far it becomes nondescript. You’re actually much better off on the side of less contrast than extensive contrast, because rocks tend to isolate themselves from other things and call too much attention.
Highlight Caution
Most of us use photographic reference, which compresses and over-contrasts certain aspects of the landscape. Highlights can get too bright and intense. Shadows don’t call attention the way highlights do. The brighter something is, the more the viewer’s attention goes there. Make sure there’s no highlight on your rocks brighter than anything in the sky. The brightest thing in most paintings should be the sky. There are rare exceptions, don’t worry about those. Just follow the rule.
When you’re painting that part of the landscape, you can get overly focused and proud of interesting strokes. As you progress, you have to soften them, get rid of them, or change them altogether. Never get too attached to any one part. Your painting is a gestalt, everything affects everything else.
Boulders
Boulders are big rocks that are somewhat isolated and separate from other things. They can be very interesting to paint, but watch out, they can take on more prominence than you want. Make sure boulders are in proximity to something else in your landscape. Pull a boulder up against a tree instead of away from it.
Anything in your painting surrounded by space is on its way to being classified as a subject. Unless you want the subject to be “boulders at twilight,” make sure isolated boulders in the reference become an extension of the landscape features, not something separate calling inordinate attention to itself.
Cliffs and Outcroppings
With rocky cliffs and outcroppings, the same information applies: watch out for extreme contrast, avoid painting things too sharp or too round. With cliffs, they’re not going to be isolated, usually off to the side and somewhat prominent. You can solve problems by putting the cliff in shadow.
I recommend working from darkness at the edge toward middle tones. Don’t get too fancy or involved within the cliff itself. You don’t want something real light at the outside edge, that calls attention. The cliff is usually not the subject. The subject is probably a tree or the sky in relationship to a tree. The cliff needs to be a supporting character, not a ham actor overshadowing the star.
Err on the side of less contrast rather than too much. Err on the side of being a little darker rather than lighter. You can create so many distracting elements with rock painting that it takes on too much prominence and becomes a fail.
It’s all about integration. 100 percent about integration. Not just with cliffs, but with any rocky form in your landscape.
Technical Approaches
Directional Brushwork
You can have planes with different brush directions, one way with one plane, another way with other planes. Don’t get too fancy. The thing is, directional brushstrokes create angles, and remember one of the first problems we pointed out: rocks that are too sharp and angular. You need to strike a balance. If you can pull off directional brushwork in a way that works, great. I’ve also failed miserably many times. All of this is 100 percent based on my own failures.
Modulation should be a big aspect of anything you’re painting.
Palette Knife
I’m not a palette knife painter. It doesn’t lend itself well to working on panels, you need the bounce of canvas. Some people do whole paintings with a palette knife, which is totally valid. Richard Schmidt knew when and how to use it appropriately. Palette knives can work very well for rocks. For palette knife painting to work, you need to lay it down and leave it alone. You can’t keep messing around, things become muddled and vague. A palette knife painting is for the brave.
Strategic Use of Rocks
Using rocks strategically can be awesome. Just a rock here or a rock there breaks up boring areas. There are scenes I paint with no rocks in the reference where I include some, even vaguely indicated.
Everyone looking at your work has a vast reservoir of archetypal rocks, clouds, streams, trees in their brain. When you give them something indicative and appealing, they fill in the rest. You could have a couple squiggles in the grass and people will say, “That’s a rock.” That’s what you want. Everything in the landscape should support the viewer’s collaboration, they’ll complete the image in their mind based on what you’ve indicated.
If you strike it right with big shapes, interesting color modulations, shapes in appropriate areas, balanced nicely against each other, you’ll have the best landscape paintings. When you load it up with detail, extra textures, convoluted or intense or sharp variations in contrast, that’s when things become unappealing and elements become distracting.
Compositional Strategies
Rocks can be excellent compositional helpers or a real problem. Always think strategically.
Ask yourself: How large should rocky masses be? Where best to place them in relation to other elements?
Many times I put rocks off to the sides of my painting. The more something occupies the middle, the greater attention focused on it, especially if it’s isolated. It becomes the subject whether you want that or not. Rocks and rocky features belong off to the side, related to something else.
Always Be Strategizing (ABS)
That’s not just with rocks, it’s with everything in your landscape. Clouds, trees, paths, areas of nothing, the grass. You’ve got to have a plan. Not a stiff plan, not a convoluted one, just your best attempt at getting the scene across. The reference is just grist for the mill, fodder to stimulate the painting. Change any aspect to be more conducive to the viewer apprehending the scene in a wonderful, inspiring way. That’s what painters do.
Learn from the Masters
The masters have dealt with this. Everyone accomplished as a painter has dealt with rocks. You can learn quite a lot by making studies after the masters and seeing how they approach rocks. When you make a study after a master painter, it trains your deeper subconscious to know what is good through muscle memory. Looking at an image in a book and appreciating it is one thing. But when you make a study, it goes so much deeper.
When I first started, I did zero studies after the masters. It wasn’t until four or five years in that I started. My work went from here to here. I needed to learn from the greats. Make that part of your process right off the bat. If a painting with rocks failed, find master paintings with similar subjects and make studies. They don’t need to be big. You’ll learn just as well working small. Get those problems solved in the deeper reservoirs of your mind so when it comes up again, you’ll have better aptitude and ability to approach it.
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