To add to Tempus' excellent advice, have many 'inspirations'. This could be an artist that does composition really well, or someone who really nails the color, etc. Study their art. Try to break their art down (why did this composition work, why do these colors work together, etc). In short, learn from the masters. I found that doing this improved my critical thinking and understanding on the subject I'm trying to study.
I suggest studying perspective first. Even if you have a nice composition or value structure or color harmony, once the perspective is off, everything automatically feels wrong. Our eyes are trained since birth to see good perspective and people can easily spot bad perspective even if they don't have any background in art. Perspective (along with other art fundamentals) is a way to convince the human eye that a flat image exists in a real three-dimensional space.
happytriangles wrote:I feel like I am able to draw things suck as trees, objects, flower, people, singular things like that but when it comes to painting landscapes and such I feel like I'm missing something...
happytriangles wrote:The main problem I have is with the coloring. I don't really make my own palettes, my color choices always become so muddy so I use palettes on colourpod (tumble) as well as use the color dropper tool on photos with colors I find pleasing.
This is because it's easy to isolate one subject matter. When dealing with landscapes or environments, you're dealing with multiple subject matters in a vast space, and in effect, there are more variables in play to make a good scene. Again, fundamentals help with this. But I suggest trying to get the perspective down first, don't add colors or anything, just nail down the perspective. Once you're done with that, you can now start to think about colors. Colors is a bit tricky, and it took me a long time to really figure this out (and I'm still studying it) but in short, colors all depend on the light source.
Remember, anything we can SEE is hit by light (either natural or artificial) and light dictates how your colors should look like. Let's take a common subject, trees, or more specifically, the leaves of a tree. If you think about its color, you would normally say its green. But that's what it looks like in a clean lighting condition (i.e. clear day no clouds). If you look at those leaves again during sunset, they won't look all too green anymore. At night, they have darker colors.
Now for fun, let's say our landscape painting is a mountain with trees. It's the middle of the night, no moon lighting our scene, no artificial light, and let's just say that there's a big fire in the forest. Now, what do you think is the color of the leaves?
That's a rhetorical question. My point is to get you to think that color is produced by the presence of light. Don't pick colors based on just what you think they are, always consider what the light source is, where it's positioned in relation to the subject matter, the color of the lightsource itself, the intensity of the light, the environment of the subject matter, if there are any obstructions in that light source, and a few million other things.
When studying light, look at how real light works. Study photos, study what you see. I especially like looking at professional photographers' pictures because they are really good at capturing the right lighting. I also think it's worthy to study stylized art (like anime) because you're looking at somebody's own understanding and application of lighting. Ghibli works are a goldmine for both studying and inspiration (and entertainment) IMO.
tl;dr Study the fundamentals, study other artists, and study how light works. And the last thing I want to say is to practice! You won't master these concepts without real practice and study. I haven't even touched about how light reacts to different materials (i.e. wood, glass, rock, etc) but I'll leave that up to you to study. Take one step at a time :)
