How to create distance on a flat piece of paper
If you need your landscape painting to give the impression of distance, it helps to get the tones right, so that the lighter tones are far away and blurred and the darker ones with more detail, are closer. These 14 year old students from Bristol show how its done.
Gouache paints are being used on slightly wet watercolour paper to paint the sky.
The "top" of the clouds are unpainted and left the colour of the paper, and the lower part of the cloud is thinly painted with a tiny touch of burnt umber added to the sky blue.
In contrast to the hazy blue - grey horizon, middle distance areas have more true colour and can be painted using slightly less water.
The foreground can have very dark tones. In these paintings the nearest areas are almost black.
Adding detail to very close objects can emphasise the distance even more.
When work is finished, it looks better mounted on black sugar paper, and should be labelled and displayed in the school.
SHIVA Charity (UK) puts these free educational pages on its web site in order to be used primarily in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Darjeeling, India, where lessons are mostly repetitive "chalk and talk" and curriculum restrained. We are involved in teachers' resources training there, and hope that schools in the UK and elsewhere will support SHIVA Charity's cause with funding. Please visit our main pages to see the work we do, and how we raise money for individual projects and for child sponsorship.
