Landscape art captures the moods of nature.
A landscape painting has the ability to capture the three-dimensional world around us on a flat surface. Sometimes landscape art seems so realistic you might feel that you can walk right into the painting. Artists create landscape paintings that seem to make us feel the wind blowing through the leaves and hear the cries of birds. You can learn more about the nature around you by studying landscape paintings--and by painting a landscape of your own.
Definition
You might have seen landscape paintings while visiting a museum or looking at your favorite book. A landscape is a painting, drawing, or photograph that shows the nature around us, like mountains, valleys, or forests. Most landscape art includes the sky.
History
Landscape art goes back many years. The first landscape paintings were backgrounds for portraits made by Greeks and Romans in the 14th century. Most landscapes decorated walls in expensive country estates. Wealthy people often paid artists to create the portraits.
During the 18th and 19th century, art lovers began to accept landscapes as a subject for artworks, even if the paintings didn't include people. The impressionists, a group of artists that included the famous Claude Monet, brought attention to landscape painting with their unique style of painting. They used bright colors and dappled brush strokes. Their art gave you a feeling or "impression" of the place they were painting.
Elements
Landscape art includes a foreground, which is the area closest to you in the painting. The middle ground often includes the horizon line, which is the line where the sky meets the ground. The background of a landscape consists of the area farthest from you in the painting. When artists create landscape paintings, they include these elements. They often add their own interpretation of nature by deciding which feature of the landscape their painting will focus on. They might paint some parts of the landscape and decide to leave other things out. Or they might try to be absolutely realistic.
Famous Examples
You've probably seen famous examples of landscape art without even realizing it. Winslow Homer is an American landscape artist who painted pictures of the Adirondack Mountains. He created his most recognized painting, "The Gulf Stream," in 1899. Claude Monet, a French impressionist painter of the early 1900s, created dappled landscapes depicting flowers and lily pads found in his pond and garden. The name "impressionism" comes from his work. Some children's books feature landscape paintings, too.
Your Landscape Art
You can create your own landscape art by following simple tricks that landscape artists use. To make a landscape artwork appear as if it's three-dimensional, draw a winding path that moves from the foreground to the background, getting narrower and narrower along the way. Try overlapping objects in your landscape, such as drawing a big rock in front of a mountain, which makes the mountain look far away. Decide how much sky you want in your art and draw the horizon line at the bottom of your sky. Keep the foreground, the middle ground and the background in mind as you fill in the details of your landscape.
