Creating imaginary landscapes

Here’s a fascinating way to boost your creativity and your imagination.

I have recently been re-reading a watercolour painting book from the 1980’s that has been sitting on my bookshelf and gathering dust for many a year. It is by an American artist called Claude Croney, and in it he describes one method for seeing patterns rather than objects and using these patterns to fire up your creative imagination.

I gave it a go and was pleasantly surprised by the results. So let me share it with you as it might be something you want to do, especially when stuck indoors on a cold winter’s day!

Go from this…

…to this!

The method

1. Find a photo of something that is NOT a landscape but has areas of good tonal contrast. A black and white photo is best.

2. Place a viewfinder onto the photo and select an area that looks interesting with good shapes.

3. Make a thumbnail sketch of the shapes you see using just three values

4. Look at this value sketch from every angle until you see a landscape in it

5. Paint the landscape, making any adjustments you need for it to work.

So, let me show you what I came up with.

The photo

1

2

I took this photo (1) in the summer in Annecy, France, but for this exercise I was not looking to paint the beautiful scenery. I zoomed in on the group of people in the left corner as these gave me more value contrast and random shapes, (2).

I turned the photo into black and white on my tablet (easy to do in Google photos), and then used a viewfinder to select an area that looked interesting.

I then painted a small thumbnail by copying the shapes I could see, firstly painting everything that was either grey or black (3), and then painting in the black patterns (4).

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Then came the fun part, and it took me a while turning the thumbnail this way and that before I began to see “landscapes” within it.

Here’s what I saw first.

The white part looked like a snowy mountain ridge receding into the distance. From there I was able to imagine the bottom left dark shape as a hillside of fir trees and the right hand shape as a clifftop. So far so good.

I then attempted a thumbnail in colour to see if this idea would actually work.

Whilst I liked the portrait layout and some aspects of the picture, I was unhappy with that big lump on the right hand side. it seemed like an ugly and unnecessary intrusion into the picture. So I tried a second time, cutting down the area of pine trees and removing the brown mass completely. This left a better composed picture. But it was all a bit boring and – yawn – “seen before”.

Time for another attempt. I turned the original three-value thumbnail around again and saw another landscape idea lurking there.

I saw a well lit pathway passing between some trees and heading towards a bright sky. I sketched it in pencil and then did another colour study in watercolour. Although not entirely original, this did seem to hold more promise than my first attempt so I decided to use this idea to paint a small study in oils.

The final painting

Click through to watch my progress, starting with the basic value scheme and then adding more detail as time went on.

I hope you have found this interesting. Why not give it a go?

#landscapes #oilpainting #paintingtips #watercolourpainting