EASEL OF Charmaine Davis
Charmaine Davis
I'm trying to teach myself how to paint landscapes. I especially love painting mountains. I am also not sure I have the easel set up correctly. If i need to fix something please let me know. 😁
I am open to critique
I WOULD LIKE HELP WITH
Any help on improving my perspective and figuring out light and shadows we be greatly appreciated. 🙂
Hello there – it’s been years since I’ve done an online critique so my apologies if any of this is unclear:
I really like this painting – you’ve done a lot of things right here and it totally makes me want to visit this spot.
I think the thing that jumps out at me the most that I think will help with having a strong sense of perspective and depth would be to really make sure that the light sources are clear and consistent throughout.
For an outdoor scene, this can be really difficult, but I’ve done some arrows in my paintover to show what I mean.
In my examples, I’m going to assume the intention is that the lighting is coming from the right, so take these comments in that context.
Some examples:
1) the boulders in the upper center seem to be lit with an edge light coming from right above or slightly to the left, but the mountains in the background seem to be lit from a side light coming from the right.
2) based on how I’m reading the painting, it seems like there should be a sort of ravine where the waterfall is, so it would seem like the rocks on the left side of the ravine would be lit by the light coming from the right, but instead the rocks on the right side are brighter.
Again, I may just be reading the painting wrong, but regardless of which light source is intended, reading your painting and making sure that things read as if they are lit consistently would, I believe, make them appear more like they truly share an environment.
Your waterfall is pretty awesome – I really like how you painted it – especially the small tributaries. I can almost hear the sound of the falling water, and the ripples below read really well.
If you were painting a scene like this again, I think there may be an opportunity to pull a few more of the environmental colors into the water as reflected light, as well as possibly utilizing your water color (like this gorgeous blue) in other parts of the painting to bring some color unity between the rich blue of the water and the browns, greens, reds, and yellows of the rest of the work.
The atmospheric perspective of the faded mountains in the back is great, and the foreground details you placed at the bottom of the painting helped create depth as well. I think it might be good to be careful of having the same color/value for grass in the foreground and grass on the other side of the water (green circle on my paintover).
Hope this is helpful – let me know if you have any questions!