I think one of the biggest ‘aha!’ moments I had when learning to paint was to stop looking at the world as objects, and instead start seeing it as shapes and layers.
For a self confessed sketcher, this was quite a wild way to start looking at the world. After all, I’m more accustomed to drawing things first and then using paint to essentially fill in the gaps. It took me a while to realise that, in terms of watercolor, this isn’t necessarily the best way to approach things. In many ways watercolor is about suggesting an object rather than rendering it accurately. Counter intuitively, things can ring more true if you stop trying to paint the thing and instead just paint it as a layer or shape.
I can’t remember exactly where I heard this. It might have been an interview with Joseph Zbukvic, or one of the other master impressionist painters who said something along the lines of “Don’t paint a cow, paint the shape of something that looks like a cow”. This is particularly important, and was a bit of an eye-opener for me because up until that point I had very much been trying to paint the cow, so to speak. Where this lesson really came to life for me was with landscapes.
Now, landscapes aren’t my most common type of picture. I typically prefer the messy, vibrant urban scenes that capture the lived in texture of a place. But occasionally I like to inject a bit of green or nature into those scenes, like you see above. This is where painting in shapes and layers really comes into its own. Painting this scene of Mt Fuji would be simple enough, but we also have other hills, mountains and any number of houses and fields. How to tackle all of this? Well, you just need to split it into layers and just do everything as shapes.
I think this works wonders when we have lots of mountains or hills. We simply combine them together to create one layer. The same thing goes for the field in the front. In reality this might be a series of different fields, gardens and even roads - but when I make the choice to simply paint as a single layer - it becomes a lot more manageable.
The added benefit of this strategy is that it can create continuity with painting. I love ink drawing, but it has the habit of unintentionally splitting up a scene into different segments: doors, windows, walls and so on. When we paint, we have to essentially forget those divisions and instead paint over them in layers. Here’s a good example below. I did the ink drawing first and focussed on making a drawing I was happy with. But when it came to the painting, I didn’t paint individual houses (or roofs, windows etc). I painted all of them as a single layer. The same was true of the shadows. I started on the left and and moved gradually to the right - varying up the temperature as I went.
What I particularly like about this method of painting (even though it hurts my sketcher brain sometimes) is that you can have variation even within the shape. I recently created a new tutorial video on landscapes, which I quite enjoyed because as I painted the mountains, I started to vary up the temperature (e.g. how warm and cool a color is) to suggest distance and depth. For a long time I was painting in layers and shapes but I wasn’t painting inside the layers themselves. This is the thing I was trying to get across most in this video. The idea that even though you may be working inside a shape, you can still add a lot of textural variation.
You can see this above. If you look at the background mountain you’ll notice it’s cooler on the right and then warmer on the left. This was deliberate. By painting this as a single layer, but with a temperature change, I was able to suggest the idea of some mountains being closer and others being further away. The same goes for those foreground trees, which I painted pretty much as an entire layer. Now, I know they’re separate trees - but that’s only really important for the drawing. When it comes to painting - it’s a singular mass, with varying temperatures.
On any kind of creative journey there will always come these kinds of ‘aha!’ moments that force us to look at things in a different way. I’m pleased to report that these are still coming to me now. I’d already been experimenting with painting for years before I realised that this is probably what I should have been doing all along. But I don’t really think of this in terms of regret - it is a journey after all. I’ve just realised that the journey is now mostly….in layers and shapes.
Create a landscape using layers is now available to watch on my online course hosted on Patreon.