Friday's Class

Friday was the final day of the landscape portion of Carol Tarzier's class. The lesson was about the use of perspective. This painting is, once again, another start on a, yet unfinished, landscape. The concepts of vanishing points were discussed as a means to create perspective. Again, we used the peach ground, with a purple drawing, not too warm, and not too cool. Diane left a comment on an earlier post, asking me to include some of the ideas that were being presented in the class. In response to Diane's request, I'll try to present some of the main concepts that Carol emphasized, at the same time, try to keep it short, and simple. So here goes, the most important concept involved the idea of the basic values used in landscape painting. Usually the lightest value is the sky, the source of light, the next lightest is the ground, which receives the light, followed by the distant slanting plane, usually the mountains. The darkest value would be the foreground verticals, such as trees. This information must be very familiar to experienced landscape painters. To me, learning about the four values was all new information, and it all made perfect sense. If interested, these ideas are presented in more detail in John Carlson's book, Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting, which is an assigned text for our class. Learning about landscape painting has been a whole new experience for me. I learned a lot! Thank you, Carol!

.