A Three-Plane Mountain Scene, Start to Finish
Okay. This is the one everything else in this module has been pointing toward. We've done values front to back, we've done cool distance and warm foreground. Today we put it all together in one painting, start to finish, and I'm going to talk through every decision while I make it, including the ones I second-guess halfway through.
Three planes. Background ridge, a midground slope, a foreground shape, maybe a tree or some rock. That's it. That's the whole structure. Everything we've practiced is in service of this.
Set up before you start
Draw your three shapes lightly in pencil first. Not detail, just where each plane sits and where they overlap. The overlap matters more than the shapes themselves. A ridge that tucks behind a slope reads as far away. A ridge that just sits next to a slope with a gap reads as flat, no matter how you color it.
Mix three puddles before you touch a brush. I mean this literally, have them ready in your palette wells before the first stroke goes down.
- Background puddle: cool, light, low contrast. Bluish gray, mostly water.
- Midground puddle: a step darker, a little more neutral, maybe a touch of warmth creeping in.
- Foreground puddle: your darkest, warmest mix. This is where the sienna and the greens live.
I know I've said this before but I'll say it again because it's the whole lesson: layers, not detail, make a landscape read. If you get these three values right and stop, the painting will look finished even with almost nothing in it. People try to fix a flat mountain scene by adding little detail marks, tiny trees, texture on the rock. That's treating a symptom. The problem is almost never detail. It's separation.
Background ridge
Wet-on-dry, one pass, same as we've been doing since the sky lessons. Load your background puddle, run it along your pencil line for the ridge, and stop. Don't go back in to soften an edge or add a bump. Our air will start setting that wash in under a minute, especially if you're painting somewhere dry and a little warm, so any second pass is going to sit on top instead of blending, and you'll get a hard scar right through your nice soft distant ridge.
Let it dry all the way before you touch the midground. Not almost dry. Dry. Go refill your water, wipe your brush, give it the two or three minutes.
Midground slope
Same idea, one shade darker, and this time you're painting right up to the edge of the dried ridge and letting the two touch. Where they overlap is where the distance happens. If you paint the midground shape floating in empty space with air around it, it won't read as behind anything, it'll just read as a gray shape.
This is where I want to bring up an opinion I hold pretty hard: I feel like people massively overwork this step trying to get gradation into the slope, like it needs to shade from light to dark across its own surface. It doesn't, not yet. One value, wet-on-dry, committed. You can vary it later once the whole structure is down. Right now you're building the skeleton.
Let it dry again.
Foreground
Your darkest puddle, your warmest, and this is where you get to have some fun with edge. The foreground can be more textured, more broken, more interesting than the two planes behind it because it's close, and close things have detail while far things don't. That's just how eyes work. A tree here, a rock shape, whatever your reference has going on.
I'll say this too since it comes up every time somebody's working from a photo instead of standing on the mountainside: painting from a photo is not cheating. Nobody's handing out points for authenticity. The composition is the actual work, the reference is just information. Use it.
The part where I tell on myself
The first real painting I ever did was a canyon wall, right after I'd rappelled it that morning with David and Brady. I got the rock exactly right, I was actually kind of proud of it, and then I got greedy on the sky above it and dumped way too much water in. It ran down into the rock like a tide line, ruined the whole top third.
I kept that painting anyway. Had it taped to my fridge for a year. Not because it was good. Because the rock proved I could do the hard part, and the sky proved I hadn't learned patience yet. Same lesson applies here. If your foreground and midground are working and your background ridge got a little muddy because you rushed the dry time, that's not a disaster, that's information. Don't scrub at it. Let it dry, decide later if it's worth a second painting.
Before next time
Paint this same three-plane structure twice more, using two different photos, and don't let yourself add detail to either one beyond what the value separation already gives you. If it looks flat, the fix is contrast between planes, not more marks.