One of the biggest challenges in painting landscapes is creating a sense of depth. Depth is what gives a sense of space and scale to a landscape. It’s easy to inadvertently break the sense of depth, and make the painting feel like a flat, two-dimensional page with paint on it. Which, I mean, it is! But when it feels real, like a scene that you could walk into? Pure magic.
What can we do in our painting to create this illusion?
Creating Depth Cues
We can use detail, color, and composition to help us create the illusion of depth. Each “toolkit” contains certain cues that make things seem further away, and certain cues that make things seem closer to the viewer.
Detail Variables
More detail, sharper edges, and high contrast make elements seem closer to the viewer, while less detail, softer edges, and low contrast can make things seem further away.
Color Variables
Landscape elements that are closer tend to be darker valued, higher chroma (more vibrant), and can tend to contain “warmer” colors (red, orange, yellow), as opposed to further elements which can tend to be lighter valued, lower chroma (more muted/grayish), and tend to be bluer.
In Watercolor School, Hazel Harrison explains,
You probably will have noticed that far-away hills look blue or blue-gray, and are much paler than anything directly in front of you. This effect, known as aerial perspective, is caused by particles of dust and moisture in the atmosphere, which diffuse the light, effectively drawing a series of ever thicker “veils” over distant landscape features.
Hazel Harrison, Watercolor School (1993), p. 105
I have typically seen this effective referred to as “atmospheric perspective.”
The hue aspect of atmospheric perspective sometimes referred to with the motto “warm colors jump forward, cool colors recede.”
Composition Variables
The size and placement of objects relative to each other can contribute to, or break, the illusion of depth. I was inspired in this section most by examples in Tom Hoffmann’s book Watercolor Painting. He writes,
Although everything is actually happening on a flat piece of paper, the individual shapes that make up the scene must appear to be in different planes. We ask ourselves: Is the message clear? We usually want the viewer to know where the elements of the scene are relative to each other, so we take care to establish foreground, middle, and background planes, like the flats in a stage set. The wonderful irony is that the primary tool for creating the illusion of three-dimensional dimensional depth is how we arrange the shapes on the two-dimensional picture plane.
Tom Hoffmann, Watercolor Painting (p. 277)
I created my own examples, but they’re largely inspired by Hoffmann’s.
Overlapping
Place one object in front of another to be sure the audience gets the message that it’s in front.
When objects just touch at the edges, they appear to be on the same plane and can cause confusion or conflict with other depth cues. An easy adjustment is to move them slightly so that the object that is supposed to be in front overlaps, reinforcing the sense of the depth.
Alignment
Objects with aligned edges, or that lie parallel, appear to be on the same plane. Simply changing the angle of one of them can fix this.
Relative Size
Things that are further away appear smaller.
Linear Perspective
As they recede away from you, any lines (or implied lines) in your scene will converge toward a vanishing point. This is a common feature of urban scenes with streets and buildings and neat rows of light poles, but can also be taken advantage of in outdoor scenes, e.g. by adding a path.
If the perspective if off, or inconsistent across objects, this can break the illusion of depth. Whole books and classes are dedicated to perspective, but let’s just say here that a common pitfall for me is flipping the direction the lines should go when drawing a building.
Applying the variables
The different variables lend themselves best to consideration at different stages during the process of creating a watercolor painting.
Undersketch
Testing out different composition options in thumbnails before you paint can help ensure that your composition choices support the illusion of depth (and don’t break it). Consider overlapping, alignment, relative size, and linear perspective at the sketch stage, while things are still easy to erase.
Wetness
A handy coincidence is that several of the depth variables are created in the same way in watercolor. More water, especially working wet-in-wet, gives you:
- softer edges
- less detail
- lighter values
- lower chroma
All “further back” cues! Conversely, working more dry (thicker paint, wet on dry) makes it easier to create several of the “closer” cues, such as hard edges, more detail, darker values, and higher chroma.
Layers
A common way of using depth cues in watercolor is to designate each “layer” of the painting as a different plane of depth, and to paint them back-to-front.
Layered mountains are a classic example. If you are painting a mountain range, you might paint a series of layers, each with a different ridgeline, starting with the furthest back (lightest, lowest chroma) and working your way toward the ridges closer to the viewer.
But even less dramatically layered paintings can use this strategy. For example, a 3-layer painting might consist of:
- A wet-on-wet sky
- A wet-on-damp, low-contrast, low-detail background
- A wet-on-dry, high-contrast, high-detail foreground
Advanced Topics
Gradients
You don’t need to work in layers, like “stage flats” as Tom Hoffmann says, in order to vary the depth cues. Joyce Hicks is a master at painting fields that seem to gradually, seamlessly lighten or shift to a bluer color as they recedes into the distance. Watercolor’s gentle transitions can be excellent for creating gradients like this.
Playing with “mismatched” depth cues
Generally, the illusion of depth is stronger when the depth cues work together. Still, you don’t have to use every cue, every time. There may be a good reason to ignore one; for example, if there is a line of light-colored trees in the front of your scene, it may be important to you to ignore the “darker seems closer” rule. In that case, you can use other cues to make up for it. For example, you could double down on the trees being higher-chroma, or having sharper edges, or the mountain being bluer.
Better than life
A common reason for not changing the depth variables is that “real life was just like that.” The distant mountains and the closer trees were the same value. The closer branch was at the same angle as the distant ridge.
The trouble is that in real life you have other cues to help you judge distance. You can see in three dimensions. But a painting is two-dimensional, so you need to give the audience a little help. Hoffmann writes,
There are almost always enough subtle clues in an actual scene, and usually in a photo, to tell us where the various components are in relation to each other. By the time that information has been transferred into washes and strokes on a page, however, at least some of the subtlety is gone.
Tom Hoffmann, Watercolor Painting (pp. 284-285)
Straying from photorealistic accuracy to add those depth cues that have been lost in translation can actually help make your painting more convincing. You need to exaggerate depth using the variables you have available to you to make up for the ones you don’t.
Summary
Here are the cues you can play with:
| Variable | Seems Closer | Seems Further Away |
|---|---|---|
| Level of Detail | More | Less |
| Edges | Harder, sharper | Softer |
| Contrast | More | Less |
| Value | Darker | Lighter |
| Chroma | Higher chroma (more vibrant) | Lower chroma (more muted) |
| Hue | More yellow/orange/red | More blue |
| Overlapping | In front | Behind |
| Relative size | Larger | Smaller |
Composition Checklist:
- Objects are overlapping, not aligned at the edges
- No parallel lines on different planes
- Perspective lines correctly angled