Landscape Painting: Quiver Tree Step by Step

I had decided to use a painting knife in order to create texture on the rocks and tree. I didn’t work on any one element at a time, finishing this before I moved onto the next. Rather, I applied one colour to the whole painting, moving onto the next colour immediately, not waiting for it to dry.

I worked more or less from dark to light, starting with raw umber for the dark shadows, then quinacridone gold “straight” from the tube, then titanium buff. Lastly I scraped on a little quinacridone gold into some of the still-wet titanium buff, creating the lighter gold areas.

Working wet-on-wet with a painting knife gives you quite a different result to working with a brush. Think of the kind of results you get when you spread jam on top of peanut butter and how this changes depending on how hard you press on the knife. It’s similar working with a painting knife. While I now know what kind of result to expect when I’m using a painting knife, there’s still an element of unpredictability about it because I’m not loading precise amounts of paint each time and am working in broad strokes, not painstakingly. One of the added attractions of working with a painting knife is that the effects can easily undone by simply scraping the paint off with the edge of the painting knife!