Folk Tale Landscapes – Light and shadow (#6)

Here’s the next video from my landscape sketching series about folk tale landscapes.

This sketch is all about how light falls through trees, and I wanted to see what it looks like when painted. I feel like this is all I really need to say. I love complex lighting situations like this, unfortunately they are hard to paint. Photography is a great tool to capture these scenes if you know how to tweak the settings, but I decided to give this a try with watercolor. I painted a smaller sketch figuring out light and shadow and the colors before I started this bigger sketch.

I’ve been at this particular spot a few times now, and in each season the forest looks different. Very lush and innocent in spring, and cool and airy in summer. This is what it’s like in early autumn, when the sun comes out a few last times in full force at a low angle. The grasses are already dry and have this bleached out, gorgeous pale color. The trees appear almost black in backlight, but the whole scene has a purple tint to it. I remember being really fascinated by the shadow patterns on the road, and how they seemed to reach for and swallow up the lighter parts. Almost as if something was hiding in the dark that devours the last days of summer. This kind of stuff is what’s usually going on in folk tales, so of course I didn’t my mind come up with anything else.

Again, I focused on a detailed pencil drawing, and then added several layers of watercolor, paying attention to the interesting warm colors in the grass and the purple shadows.

Folk Tale Landscapes – Light and shadow (#6) (video)

I hope you enjoy the video!

A bit of background info: In this series, I’m looking for landscapes that could be the background for local legends and folk tales. I’m not looking to illustrate any of the stories themselves, I’m just interested in the mood and atmosphere behind these stories and I’m looking for ways to transport this in a landscape sketch.

For more info about this painting series (and about my background), read on here and here. I started researching and creating these paintings last year (2020) and the project still continuing as I’m exploring new interesting places. Current restrictions have slowed the process a bit, but I like the thought of having an ongoing project in the back of my mind.