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FIGURES IN LANDSCAPE – Adebanji Alade
Add some life to your landscapes with the help of talented artist Adebanji Alade. We can’t wait to see who will appear in your next landscape painting.
Reference Image
Materials
Canvas
Set of acrylic paints, including Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue, Yellow Ochre, Titanium White, Lemon Yellow
Selection of fine brushes, including a filbert brush
Palette
Rag / Cloth
Water
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Preparation
For this exercise, you will need to have a landscape painting in progress.
Place your reference image and your work in progress side by side.
Prepare your palette by having two shades of the same colour next to each other. For example, a warm red and a cool red, a warm blue and a cool blue. This will allow you to easily mix your paints.
Blocking in proportions
Look at the first figure you want to paint. Where is their head positioned?
Using the mix of reddish brown paint, make a rough mark on the canvas to signify where the person’s head sits.
Then make a mark of where the their legs end.
Following this, mark out the person’s arms and legs. This will leave you with a rough idea of the person’s proportions on the canvas.
Blocking in the silhouette
Mix Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue. Take the dark mix and lightly apply on top of the marks you have already made to indicate the torso, arms and legs.
Mix Yellow Ochre, Titanium White and a small amount of red. This mixture is to tonally block in the face.
Top tip – If there is the sun hitting the figure’s face, add some Lemon Yellow to your mix to reflect this.
When you are happy with the mix for the face, take your brush and in one quick stroke apply it to where the face should be on your canvas.
Using the same skin tone mix, apply another stroke to represent the figure ‘s hands.
Work around the rest of the body in this way. Mixing up colours that correlate with the figure ‘s clothes and hair and apply them to the canvas.
If someone is wearing patterned clothes, try not to replicate the clothing perfectly, it will overcomplicate your painting.
Top tip – Adding darker lines to parts of clothing can suggest a crease and make the figure feel more realistic.
Don’t overwork anything at this point. You want fluid strokes to show the figure in motion.
With the body blocked in, mix up the colour that you used for the ground. Apply this between the figure ‘s legs, hands and feet. This helps it feel like the figure is moving.
Adding the other figures
Repeat the same process to paint the other figures in the painting.
Not everyone in the reference image needs to be painted, some can be detailed (foreground) and others (in the background) can be a stroke of paint which suggests a figure.
Be mindful of getting the proportions of each person correct in relation to the landscape and the other figures you have painted.
Keep looking at the shadows cast by each person, do you need to paint every shadow? Play around and see what works best for you.
Top tip – when painting people in the background, swap to a smaller brush to give you more control.
