On Air and Distance
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Fields, open water, and similar flat expanses don’t always offer much in that area. No overlapping silhouettes to grade from cool to warm, no middle distance hills to help transition. Instead it’s a a strip of ground, a band of water or grass and a sky; three or four horizontal zones all subject to the same atmospheric haze and none providing much spatial information on their own. It is very easy for everything just to flatten out into stripes. It’s good to remember that the further you look out, the more air you’re looking through that filters the view and affects perception of value, color and detail.
Whenever I’m having to show distance over an expanse I try to work out the values first. Air scatters light, so contrast degrades with distance. Darks generally will lighten faster than the lights darken, and looking a mile or so out, what was a strong dark-against-light pattern up close narrows down to a band of middle values. But this is not always the case with water - I took a documentarian approach with the excerpt at right, where the middle distance blue band actually was the darkest area that day, while having less discernible detail than the closer blue band. Depending on what you’re after, there are times when painting what is actually there should be prioritized over alignment to the usual rules.
On flat ground, foreground darks should usually be the darkest darks in the picture and foreground lights pretty much the lightest. At a regular eye-level viewing height, the middle ground range compresses to a little more than half of the foreground’s spread. The background compresses it again, often to a very narrow band. Determine value ranges for those areas before mixing anything and the painting will already read as deep. Color will do the rest, working on a structure that’s already correct. The standard rule of “warm forward, cool back” is true often enough to use and wrong often enough to be careful with. That approach has more to do with saturation and temperature shift: distant areas are less saturated than the corresponding near areas and will shift toward whatever the sky is doing. Usually that’s cool but sometimes it isn’t. On your typical humid Gulf morning the distant water is probably warmer than the foreground sand.
A good idea for flat-ground base color is often to mix the foreground first at 100 percent, then the same color for the middle ground by adding a little of its complement and a little of the sky color, then again for the background with more of both. You end up with three versions of the same color rather than three different ones, which is closer to what’s actually out there.
Details. Foreground grass has edges. Middle ground grass has clumps with maybe a few edges. Far background grass is a tone, not a texture. Foreground breakers have crisp white edges; the middle distance has softer shapes; near the horizon has a thin lighter or darker band at most. It is about information per square inch as much as brushwork; the foreground has the most, the background the least.
The principles are the same whether the medium is oil or acrylic, but the execution may be different. Because oil takes hours to dry you can lay in a sky, drag the top edge of a distant treeline up into it while both are wet, and the colors blend nicely. Glazing works the way it has for 500 years - a thin transparent cool layer over a dried area cuts saturation and cools temperature with one application (a thin ultramarine tint is pretty good at pushing a middle ground further back).
With acrylic, by the time you want to feather two passages together, the first may have already set. Retarder or open medium extends the window enough for sky-to-horizon transitions, but not the way oil does. Acrylic glazing mediums let you build the same recession faster but each glaze sits as a separate film rather than interacting with the layer below, so the depth comes from three or four stacked transparencies. I don’t always have the patience for that and wind up dragging a slightly opaque, lighter cool color over dried darker passages with a dry brush, which replicates how haze actually sits in front of distant objects.
There is a counterargument as to whether flat-terrain landscapes should read deep. There are strong paintings of beaches and fields that compress distance rather than amplifying it - atmospheric effects are observed but used to flatten and unify rather than drive the eye back. The principles don’t change though - if the painting needs to be quiet, the atmosphere should do less. Either way, it helps to think of the air, as well as the terrain, as the subject.
Categories: Color & Technique













