How to paint an oil Landscape. Plein air.Hi! This my first article about art and I am going to talk about landscapes, how to paint 
them and what mistakes can be made. First of all I want to say that you can paint every landscape or cityscape that you like, do not try to find sometying outstanding-start with a simple one. I also will not advise you to take a huge canvas – I would take a canvas that is comfortable for me to paint on. I usually take 50×70, 60×80 cm. Sometimes I take a metr size canvas. When i want to paint 30 minutes sketch I use 40×50, 40×60 cm.
So my first advice-do not try to impress yourself or friends or artists with a big canvas-you can fail.
This one I made in summer in Ukraine, I used a palette knife here, no brush. That is what
I wanted to try. You can see that it is very impasto – I wanted to make colours bright and fresh. The main idea for me in this painting was to depict the impression of the landscape, I didn’t paint a lot of details-that’s my second tip for artists who like plein air and landscapes. You don’t have a lot of time to show everything in your picture and this is not your goal on plein air. Try to show your feelings, do you like a landscape or not? People who will look at your art work must understand what the painter felt and thought about his picture. So an impression is the main thing in plein air laandscapes.
If you don’t have enough experience in art-it will be difficult to paint fast impressive landscape, especially if you want alife one, not boring. The third tip is – don’t try to paint everything equally! You should decide what is the most interesting thing for you? Why are you painting that landscape-probably you are interested in it, so show it, if
you noticed beautiful trees – pay attention to that in your painting, make them more detailed, emphasize several brunches or even leafes, but remember – don’t paint everything with the same attention! You should have main things and secondary ones…to be continued
Sergey Gusev Art 