Atmosphere will let you put distance in a painting. Ok first
what is atmosphere, it is the air around the Earth and all that is in
it. It is the dust and pollen and any other particles in the air. As
you look out away from you, you will see none of this, but it is there.
Now what does it do that helps you put distance in a painting.
1. It will make the out line of an object less sharp the
further away it is, the less sharp it is.
2. It will make the color less intense, The further away an
object is the grayer it will appear.
3. Detail well be lost . The further away the less detail
you will see and paint. There are other ways of adding distance in a painting but here we will just talk about the use of color and value.
In the little drawing above we have the painter sitting at
his canvas looking out at a landscape. For this example we will say
that the atmosphere goes up as high as the line it is marked to. Now we
will say that A.B.C.D. is the sky in your painting. Look at the little
painting below and you will see that the top of the painting is a deep
blue (A. color and value), as you come down the painting the color and
value will become B., and then C. and D. as you come on down the
painting. WHY. Look up at the drawing at the top again. If you stand
outside and look straight up the sky will be as blue as it will get, as
you lower your head and eyes you will see that the blue sky will gray,
How much it will gray will depend on how far you can see and how much
dust is in the atmosphere. It is looking through the atmosphere that will filter out the color,and the more you are looking through the more color will be lost.
In
the little painting above you will see there is distance. All we have
are trees and sky, but what is a landscape anyway, trees and sky. Again
look at the drawing at the top you will see E. F. G. H. and I. Each one
of these marks a distance from the painter to a row of trees. the trees
that are the closest is E. and you can see it is bright green. As you
go on back to the next row of trees you will see that they appear to be
less green and a little lighter in value, and as you move back each row
of trees will appear to be a little less green (most of the time they
will go a little to the blue) and will become lighter in value. There
is one rlue I would like to add and it goes like this -- The darkest
dark in the row of trees F. can never be as dark as the darkest
dark in row E. It also is that the darkest dark in row G. can never be
darker than the darkest dark in E.or F. and so on. If you put
a dark in the distance that is darker than one that is in the
forground it will draw distance forward and it will also create an eye
hook, and boys and girls that ant good.
