8976 Landscape Contours
Jerry Yarnell – Inspiration of Painting Fine Art Instructional PBS Television Video Series

In this beginner acrylic painting lesson, Jerry guides you step-by-step through a 108 minute study devoted to understanding and painting landscape contours on an 18 x 24 canvas. Rolling hills covered with colorful wildflowers rise and fall naturally across the scene, while a small distant farmhouse, bare trees, and softly receding land help demonstrate how the shape and direction of the terrain create convincing depth, distance, and movement in a landscape.

You'll learn how to paint rolling hills and uneven terrain so the land appears to rise, fall, curve, and recede instead of looking flat. Jerry demonstrates fine art techniques for using brushstrokes, value changes, color, highlights, shadows, vegetation, and the placement of flowers to follow the contours of the land. This step-by-step acrylic painting tutorial is especially useful for beginning artists who want to understand how to give hills, fields, and ground surfaces realistic shape and dimension.

Special focus is given to landscape contours, rolling hills, slopes, ground planes, wildflower fields, and creating realistic depth and distance across uneven terrain. Jerry shows how the direction and placement of grasses, flowers, highlights, and shadows can reinforce the underlying shape of the land, helping the viewer clearly see where a hillside rises, turns, dips, or slopes away into the distance.

By the end of this lesson, you'll have a better understanding of how landscape contours affect the structure and realism of a painting and how to use natural details to describe the shape of the ground. This beginner acrylic painting tutorial is an excellent fine art study for artists who struggle with landscapes that appear too flat and want to learn how to create more convincing rolling hills, slopes, depth, distance, and three-dimensional terrain.