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Landscape painting is a big subject. You could paint a small vase of flowers, or paint a corner of a small room, but there is no such thing as a small landscape. Those clouds in the foreground might be 5 miles away, on a clear night your main subject may be a comet. Even a small tree is a truly enormous plant....

If a landscape painting is to evoke some of the  real experience then it cannot be made up or adequately recalled from memory. This is why sketches, studies and outdoor paintings are essential to modern landscape art.

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The Thought Cloud

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A lot of information can be crammed into a small space with oil paint. This painting measured 6x7 inches overall.

As with most of my work, this is a combination of outdoor and studio work. The initial image was composed and painted outdoors and then developed over a period of time. This two pronged approach gave me the chance to be more selective than I could have been if I’d tried to finish it on the spot. I was able to take a thin glaze of raw sienna over the surface of the sketch when it was dry to warm up the colour in places and highlight the brushwork.

Photographs, pencil sketches and scribbled notes can all be invaluable aids to establishing an outdoor painting especially one of an evolving, mercurial image like fast moving clouds or dawn and sunset, or a rainbow.  

Painting outdoors on smaller canvases is quicker and makes it easier to capture specific moments in time.

More on outdoor oil painting methods, tips for the unwary etc. click on- 

Outdoor Oil  Painting Techniques