Dry grass, scrub, and a few marks for interest
Last time the sky, mountains, and foreground went down in that order, and stopping there would already give you a decent little painting. Today's job is the foreground — the spot where people either get precious or get bored. We're going to do neither.
The foreground is closest to the viewer, so it's the one place your brain will beg for detail: every blade of grass, every rock. Resist that. A few confident marks read as "dry grass and scrub" far better than fifty careful ones. That's the whole lesson — less is more, but the less has to be decisive.
What we're actually doing
Your foreground wash is probably down from last time — a warm yellow-green-brown mix, mostly dry now. We're going on top of it with dry-brush marks that suggest texture without drawing every stalk individually. The steps:
- Set up the brush. Use your round brush, the same one you've been using, but almost dry. Load it with paint, then drag it across a paper towel or the edge of your palette until it looks like it barely has anything left. This is dry-brushing, and it's the opposite of the wet-into-wet we've chased so far. Here we want texture, not blend.
- Drag at a low angle. Pull that half-dry brush across the paper almost sideways, not straight down like you're stabbing it. You'll get broken, scratchy marks where the paint catches the tooth of the paper and skips. That skipping is the whole trick — it's what makes grass instead of a green smear.
- Work in clusters. Not evenly across the foreground. Real dry grass grows in patches — thick in some spots, thin or bare in others. Leave some base wash showing through untouched. The contrast between marked and unmarked does more work than the marks themselves.
Color, and a word on mud
Mix burnt sienna with a little of whatever green you've got, sometimes with a touch of the blue from your sky to dull it. Our foothills, especially by late summer, are not green — they're gray-gold-brown. Paint them true green and you'll get a lawn, not a hillside.
And if the colors go muddy doing this, that's fine — genuinely. Everyone panics about mud, but a little mud is exactly what dry August grass looks like. That grayed-out, not-quite-one-color mess is realistic here. Learn what makes mud so you can make it on purpose instead of fearing it by accident.
A few marks for interest
Once the grass texture is in, add three or four small, deliberate marks — not grass, something else. A fence post. A dark shrub. A rock. Pick one and repeat it two or three times at different sizes, smaller as it goes back toward the mountains. This does two things: gives the eye something to land on, and reinforces the depth we built two lessons ago with the far mountains sitting back.
Don't overthink placement. I don't work by rule of thirds — I've said that before — I look at the paper and put the mark where it wants to be. Trust that more than you think you should.
About the paper you're using
Stay on the cheap stuff. I repeat this every lesson because I mean it every lesson. I once spent forty dollars on artist-grade paper before I could paint anything worth putting on it, told myself the purchase would make me better, then left it in a drawer for months, too scared to ruin it — while I stayed bad at basic washes on the cheap pad I already owned.
Ruin the cheap paper. That's its job. Dry-brushing especially: you'll overdo it a few times before your hand learns how dry "almost dry" is. Better learned on a two-dollar pad than on something you're precious about.
One practical note: dry-brushing behaves differently depending on how dry the paper underneath already is. If your base wash is still even slightly damp, the marks will bleed and soften instead of staying scratchy. Out here that's rarely a problem — our air dries washes fast — but in a humid month, or if you painted the base wash five minutes ago, touch the paper with a clean knuckle first. If it feels cool, it's still wet. Wait.
Before next time
Practice the dry-brush drag on a scrap first, a dozen times, until you can feel when the brush is dry enough. Then do it once for real on your landscape and stop. You'll want to keep going. Don't.