How to deal with noisy/attention stealing backgrounds in landscape painting?
3yr
@shackman
Something that happens to me quite often is that I see something cool, want to paint it, but the background is a mess aka a forest. Leaving photorealism out here, how do you deal with these kind of backgrounds?
Can you recommend me some resources where this issue is talked about by a good artist?
Can you recommend me some artists, traditional or digital, that deal with these backgrounds in interesting ways?
I think the obvious solution would be to simplify, add some soft edges etc. To be honest though, there is a very typical beginner look where the background is just blurry.
I know someone like craig mullins would add expression and texture, and maybe pull out his mixer brush, and blow you away with the background while perfectly weaving it into the composition. How do I get there ? ;-)
I've included a photo I just took for reference. Assume I wanted to make the painting about the bush and the grass in the foreground (the colors were actually quite good in real life), but unfortunately someone has planted those trees behind the bush...
Well.. it's actually a way to paint all those intricacies, and if you have the patience to do them right they will look fantastic. (Check out Andrey Surnov, it's like crazy how he did those textures)
If you just don't wan to be bothered with those, just dull down the contrast and use some abstract textures. It won't work if the contrast is too high. So in the case of those photograph, just leave a mid level gray wash to the background and only paint those prominent B/W tree branches.
James Gurney is an excellent artist to refer to for how to simply complex background. Check out some of his plein air painting videos.
I can give you my own approach: i have done a handful of some really detailed landscapes in my watercolour/guache sketchbook that were based on photographs/real life, and one thing i learned was that as long as it looks good in the photo/original source, it will look alright in your work. However, most of the times, such detail does not even look good within the source, and hence in such cases, i'd say either eliminate the unnecessary detail or try to get some other composition of the scene/subject matter that seeks to either eliminate such detail/pattern or present it in a way that looks good to you. Another option is to represent that detail in an abstract form by simply copying the general patterns without painting every single branch as per the source, and this can make the process easier and hopefully you end up work that doesn't look excessively "detail-y".
^ I hope this has at least something of value to you. Good luck!
Thanks! Yes, that helps. Maybe I should practice turning backgrounds into abstract patterns in isolation, so I have it in my arsenal.
