How to Paint Texas Landscapes with Fences

Not all of Texas is dry and arid; use shades appropriate to the area you are painting.

Texan landscapes, known for their wide-open plains, planted fields and farm animals, make for calm scenic paintings. Depending on your skill level and desire for detail, you can create a landscape using only a few strokes and paint colors or go all out with textured fields, cornstalks and wood fences.

Things You'll Need

• Paint (watercolor, oil, acrylic or even spray paint)
• Paintbrushes
• Canvas, paper or whatever you are painting on

Instructions

1. Prepare your canvas or paper and choose your paints. Make sure you are using a canvas or paper that is appropriate to your paint: watercolor paper for watercolors, a gessoed canvas for oils. Acrylics can be used on virtually any surface, including rusty metals (as long as they are clean).

2. Acquire a photograph of the Texas location you want to paint. Alternatively, you can simply absorb the feel of a variety of locations and allow them to inspire a freestyle landscape.

3. Draw a rough outline of the landscape on your painting surface or use paint to create an underpainting. An underpainting is done by putting down a layer of thin or diluted paint to get the general idea of where things are, so the sky area would be a very light blue, while a soft yellow would show where fields of corn will go.

4. Paint the background first. This includes the sky and clouds or farm buildings.

5. Paint your way forward in perspective: If you paint a horse in front, for example, it will hide things you have painted behind it.

6. Keep your colors consistent to the Texan plains: siennas, browns, tans, the light blues and violets of flowers, the slightly faded greens of the deserts. Avoid using saturated pop colors like vibrant pinks, reds, greens, oranges and blues. Fade them by mixing with light sand, olive, white and black to make the colors less sharp.

7. Paint in your fences. If they are in the background, you should incorporate them into the backdrop as in Step 4; make fences in the front sharp, stark and detailed. You can create details such as wood texture or age rings by using a bit of thinned black paint on the tip of a fine-tipped round brush to draw rings or jagged edges.