Build Depth in Watercolour — Paint in Layers

One of the biggest problems people have with landscape painting is understanding that there are three layers. There is a foreground, a middle ground and a background. Thinking about that in advance gives you a huge advantage. Whenever I'm beginning a painting I always start to think about where my middle ground is going to start and where the distance is going to be. So I might have sky, maybe hills, a middle ground and something in front. On that basis what I'm going to do is use simplification for the background so that nothing much is actually stated and then suggest some detail through the middle ground and then a little bit more description as it comes forward. So let's try a typical landscape. I'm just going to use a little bit of colour to fill in a sky. Let's just take that through there. Let's have a nice streaky sky through there and come down to where the hills might start. So where I do that, just change colour, make it ever so slightly stronger and then I could put in a line like that. Now that's implying hills but it's not doing anything other than simplifying them. If I wanted to go a little bit further with colour I can still add it in and it still describes those hills but they're soft. They're against a damp background and they're just floating there. That's all you need. As you come forwards what you need to do first is put in some colour and then work over the top of it. So I'm just going to bring down that sense of middle ground. Just increase my colour a little bit here. Bring it forwards, put a little variation in it perhaps and we're going to just tint that down, bring it all the way down to the front. So I've now got a landscape. I've got nothing down here in the middle ground and the foreground but I've definitely got a background. So this is now dry and I'm just going to take a smaller brush and just start to place in a little suggestion of things through the middle here. Now if I do this in a variety of shapes like this I can just imply trees and maybe fields. Let's vary my colours slightly. So all of these shapes will hopefully imply distance. There is nothing overly described and I'm getting a certain sense of one thing overlapping another but without anything really being painted. These are just marks, the slightly bigger ones coming forwards because of their size and then smaller ones behind. If I do a few in front of this as well. Let's just take one here for example. I could put another slightly bigger tree shape in here and this is still in the middle. Take that across, a little bit more water. Let some of these things run. I'll play around with the colour ever so slightly. Just drop a little bit more pigment in. So just a little bit of description but not too much. I just want to imply that I've got some trees and some fields which are overlapping going all the way back and there's a little bit of light in there, a little bit of light and dark. So that'll do. I'm not going to take this any further. I just wanted to really simplify this down. So as I work, I'm trying to imply a series of overlapping shapes of trees and bushes and fields, all of them gradually coming forwards, getting slightly bigger in size as they do. There's nothing really three-dimensional about them. They're just implied shapes. Where you have to put a little bit more in is when you come further forwards. So I'm going to put a tree in here now. Let's have a nice broken shape for this tree. We'll just get a few branches and things happening through it. A little suggestion of detail because that is the difference now compared to that middle ground. This is more of a subject because you're seeing a proper description of it rather than just a shape. So it's a little bit stronger. We've got some broken edges outside like that, like I've said. You can see small marks alongside the big marks. You've got a definite shape to it all and this is where you'll be looking. So adding a little bit of darker texture in the foreground like this. Let's put in a little fence or something as well. This takes you into the picture a little bit more. And I'm just going to boost up the colour along the bottom here a touch just to make that a more interesting look. I'll just finish off with just adding a little extra thing here or there down at the bottom. So that's it. That's all I need to do. I've got a landscape now with a main subject which is described better than anything else in the picture. It's also darker. And I've got a selection of things going backwards and proper distance there with hazy hills in the background. So remember, if you're doing this, you want to simplify. You want to have a very, very simple soft background, have a middle ground which is just suggesting things and then a foreground where you're describing something a little bit more. You can get almost any landscape painting to work for you if you just consider these three layers. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to see more, take a look at my other YouTube videos or go along to my Patreon channel where I have demonstrations with a lot more explanation.