How anyone Can Paint a Realistic Landscape (7 Rules)

If you're just getting started with realism painting it can feel really overwhelming and hard to know where to even begin. But the truth is that anyone can paint a realistic landscape and in this video I'll be walking you through seven important rules to remember using this Misty Forest painting as an example. This tutorial will cover canvas prep, values, color selection, color theory, atmospheric perspective, brushwork and more. All time timestamp to make it easier to navigate. My example is an oil painting, but you can use these same rules regardless of medium. Let's get started. The first rule is to prep your canvas with a colored ground and underpainting. A white canvas makes it hard to judge how light or dark your paint is, because everything looks dark next to all that white. A colored ground gives you a middle tone to compare against from your very first stroke, and the underpainting maps out where all your lights and darks go before you even think about color. I used yellow ochre on this canvas with a burnt umber underpainting. This rule is an absolute must for me, which is why I made a separate video that walks you through the underpainting step by step. It's linked in the description, but you don't need to watch it first to follow along here. For now, let's keep moving into the painting and rule number two. Rule number two is value before color. Value is how light or dark a color is. And if you want to get really good at realism, you need to master your values before you master your colors. Now, this might sound a little crazy if you're new to painting, but think about it. Your eyes work by reading light reflected off of objects. If the lighting doesn't make sense in a painting, what you're looking at doesn't look real. What this does mean is that we can take liberties with our colors and I'll explain more about that in the last rule so be sure to keep watching. Now a super easy way to get this right is to make your light source the lightest value in your painting. In most landscapes that's the sky. Nothing else in the painting should be lighter than that light source, not even the sky reflected in the water. You can see that here in the painting. As the trees go in, I'm only darkening the value ever so slightly, but your eye picks up on that difference. If you need help seeing your values, take the color out of your reference photo and look at it in black and white. Paying attention to the value structure will ensure that your realism is preserved, regardless of the subject you're painting. If you're enjoying this video so far, I've also written two free ebooks for artists on oil and acrylic painting that you can download in the description below. The third rule is my favorite, which is to use a limited palette. If I could go back and tell myself one thing about color when I first started painting, it would be that less is more. This painting used only five colors, and that's usually all I need in a landscape. So how do you choose your palette? Squint at your reference photo and see if one color jumps out at you. Then choose the primary color that will mix that color at its most intense. For this painting all I could see were these rich beautiful teals, so I needed the right blue to mix those emerald greens. I chose Prussian blue as my dominant color which anchored the palette. Next, look at your values. If your painting is very dark, choose a darker yellow, which gives you deeper greens. I used Cadmium Yellow Deep. From there, I rounded out the rest of the palette with Quinacridone Red, Burnt Umber, and Titanium White, and used Color Theory to stretch those pigments into every color I needed. I used to think that a full palette would be best, since I'd have access to every color and could paint everything exactly as it appeared in the photo. But something I have to remind myself of constantly is that a painting is not a photo, it is so much more. As artists, our job isn't to just copy a photo, it's to breathe life into it with color and brush strokes. Now if color mixing is something that causes you a lot of stress, I would love if you checked out my course Color Mixing with Acrylic. It's a step-by-step deep dive that leaves you with this beautiful 26-page guidebook that you can continue to build on in your painting practice. It's linked in the description below and one of my favorite exercises uses complementary colors which is our This is our next rule. Rule number four is use complementary colors to your advantage. You might be wondering how it's possible to mix blacks, grays, and every other color on this canvas from only five paint colors. The secret is complementary colors, the colors that sit opposite of each other on the color wheel. They neutralize and deepen your mixes, and they're one of my favorite ways to mix. When I first started painting I thought that you could only use two primaries at a time, like yellow and blue to make green. What I didn't know is that if you add a little red to that mix, which is the complement of green, you get a gorgeous dark teal that is way richer than if you'd added black to darken it. The same goes for every color. If you want a darker yellow, add purple. If you want to neutralize an orange, add blue. This is also how I mix my own black. I use a blue with burnt umber. Prussian blue pushes that mix a little bit towards green so I added a hint of quinacridone red to neutralize it whenever I needed to. This is how I mixed all of the shadows which are nearly black and adding white gave me the misty trees. Whenever you need a gray in your painting or you need to tone back the saturation of a color, mix complementary opposites together. Now this isn't a rule, more of a bonus tip, but one of my favorite ways to paint water is to pull the paint vertically instead of just side to side. Whenever you look at reflections, it's easy to focus on the ripples in the water that move horizontally, but if the water is still, reflections often look as though they're being pulled downwards. So the secret to painting water is to alternate your brush strokes between up and down, side to side, and don't forget to blend, blend, blend. It's time for the second layer and rule number five, which is to use atmospheric perspective. Objects in the background should look far away and objects in the foreground should feel nice and close. The misty trees in the background of this painting are a great example of atmospheric perspective. If you really want to master this concept, just remember this. The farther away an object is, the lighter it is, the cooler it is, and the less contrast it has. So if you're painting hills or trees in the distance, you can push them further back by adding a little white, a little blue, and reducing the shadows. For things that are closer, do the opposite. Make them darker, more colorful, and add more contrast. Now let's move into rule number six, which is to use deliberate brushwork. It's how you tell the viewer where to look, and it prevents distraction by focusing their eye on the most important part of the landscape. Your focal point should have tighter, more detailed brushwork and more visible edges. That pushes it closer to the viewer and cleanly separates it from the background, like what I'm doing here with the rocks by adding more detail, building them up on top of the first layer. This is a perfect example of how a painting differs from a photo. In most of my reference photos, the backgrounds are razor sharp, because that's how the camera sees. A human eye doesn't see that way, so we can use brushwork to make a painting feel more lifelike by choosing where to sharpen the focus. In practice, that means something that may feel counterintuitive. Larger, looser strokes in the background, and smaller, tighter strokes around your focal point. You might think that faraway objects need smaller movements, but our eyes reduce distant objects to loose forms and washed out blocks of color. This brings us to our final rule. Remember at the beginning when I said that we could take liberties with our colors, just not our values? Our final rule is exactly that. Use colors for your shadows and highlights instead of white and black. This is a trick Monet used to use to fill his landscapes with color and vibrancy. Shadows can be tricky for emerging painters because reference photos often crush the shadows into flat black blobs, completely robbing your painting of any detail in the darks. But when you're viewing something in person, your eyes adjust and shadows have both depth and dimension. So instead of flat black for my shadows, like in the water here, I'm using a very dark, rich blue. In my first layer, this was far too colorful, and my reflection looked borderline teal, almost like toothpaste. In the second layer, I added its complementary opposite, which was a little bit of red to neutralize it, which kept the shadow rich without looking flat, black, and heavy. I barely needed any highlights in this painting, but the idea is the same. If you have a highlight, tint them with color instead of using pure white. Do that, and not only will you have a piece that looks more realistic, it will look alive and be swimming with color. And with that, this painting is complete! Thank you so much for watching, and if color mixing is where you struggle, be sure to watch my Top 5 Acrylic Color Mixing Mistakes and How to Fix Them Next. Don't forget to grab your free ebooks, and happy painting!