Procreate Landscapes on the iPad

Brancaster Beach.

Sussex Sky.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Landscape painting: a brief history

2. Getting started with Procreate

3. Linear drawing

4. Tone

5. Mark-making

6. Perspective

7. Colour

8. Photography and digital image manipulation

9. Composition

10. Painting progress

11. Landscape reimagined

QR codes

Further reading

Index

INTRODUCTION

In January 2020 I bought a new iPad and an Apple pencil so that I could use Procreate. Although I have drawn digitally since the early 1990s with a drawing tablet and had used apps on my phone (Picsart, Adobe Draw) using my finger, as well as Autodesk Sketchbook and Brushes Redux on my first iPad, I instantly fell in love with Procreate.

Another Place.

During the pandemic’s lockdown, I spent a long time behind a computer screen longing to get out of the house. I did a lot of digital painting, learning the ins and outs of Procreate, and prepared a lot of new teaching material. When we eventually returned to face-to-face teaching, I noticed that many more students were also using Procreate and continue to do so.

As a piece of software, it’s very sophisticated and can do much of what Photoshop can do at a minimal cost for the download. Apart from the hardware you do not need to use an iPad Pro – as long as the operating system will run the software you are good to go.

I now regularly teach Procreate landscape painting on the iPad, as well as Procreate iPad portraiture. In preparation for both courses, I have made a lot of digital recreations of other artists’ work to demonstrate the versatility of the app. Mimicking the painterly quality of different artists’ work forces you to experiment with the digital brushes that you have at your disposal, and I have not felt the need to purchase any more. All the artworks in this book have been digitally painted.

Walking in any landscape can be immensely pleasurable, whether it’s the Sussex Downs that I have on my doorstep, or the rugged coastline of Cornwall. Taking a box of paints, canvases, easel, brushes, cloths and solvent with you is hard, but take your iPad and an Apple pencil and you have brought the whole studio with you and the task of painting in the landscape becomes a lot easier.

CHAPTER 1

LANDSCAPE PAINTING: A BRIEF HISTORY

Landscape painting in the Western European tradition does not become a genre in its own right until the mid-eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Early Renaissance paintings include landscapes which are theatrical backdrops to a piece of drama. These landscapes are invented spaces to allow a narrative to take place. We start to see landscape becoming a recognisable genre on its own with the rise of Romanticism.

Study of Sunset on the Matterhorn, after Albert Bierstadt.

Study of a Roman fresco. Whilst images of landscape exist in early artwork, landscape painting as a subject in its own right did not exist until the mid-eighteenth century.

In the Eastern tradition, however, paintings from the early first and second centuries onwards are preoccupied with landscape. Chinese landscapes were often invented, huge in grandeur and used space differently from the Western use of perspective.

Within the hierarchy of Western European art, figure painting (history painting) was deemed to be the most complicated and most important genre for an artist. Portrait painting would come next – painting the monarchy, the Pope and figures from history – and this was followed by genre painting which featured domestic scenes, usually aimed at telling some kind of moral tale. Landscape painting would come near the bottom, just above still life and painting animals.

Claude Lorrain (1600–82) was a French painter who spent most of his time in Italy producing imaginary landscapes of classical mythology. His imagery would have an impact on artists like Turner, and on garden design as well.

Turner was certainly influenced by Lorrain’s vision, but he trod an altogether different path once he received patronage from George Wyndham, the 3rd Earl of Egremont. This allowed him to break free from the way in which landscapes had traditionally been rendered.

Claude Lorrain (1600–82) would produce Arcadian views, set in imagined Classical landscapes. His view of nature informed how people saw landscape, even to the point that they would not look at landscape directly, but instead viewed landscape using a blackened glass mirror (the ‘Claude glass’), as the colours of landscape were too vulgar! Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown would literally reroute rivers and build hills in landowners’ estates to give them a view inspired by Lorrain. JMW Turner (1775–1851) was certainly inspired by Lorrain’s vision in his earlier paintings before he became much more interested in the dramatic impact of the weather in stormy seascape paintings. These would become increasingly abstract as he got older, to the point where his later works (many of which can be seen in the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain) look like Modernist abstract paintings.

When we look at Mr and Mrs Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88), the beautifully rendered landscape in the background of the painting is really a statement about the couple’s ownership of land.

John Constable would have had to grind his own pigments and store them in leather pouches before taking them into the landscape to make oil sketches and drawings. To our contemporary eye, these oil sketches look resolved, but they would never have been considered gallery-worthy.

The Industrial Revolution would bring about significant change: villagers moved away from their rural lives to the new towns and factories. John Constable’s oil studies captured the English rural countryside before it disappeared and many of these were then worked up into more resolved studio-based paintings.

For most people, when landscape painting is mentioned, they have the idea of the Impressionist approach – the artist working directly from nature and using a shorthand to simplify the landscape. However, that is a relatively late idea of how landscape could be rendered and artistically there is a long heritage of different ways in which landscape has been painted.

The Salon dominated the way in which artists worked, with an emphasis on historical subjects. By the late eighteenth century, however, the Neo-Classical works of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) began to tell politically driven allegorical narratives. In opposition, Romanticism would play an important role in developing a more emotional engagement with painting. Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) made rallying cries to the French Revolution in Liberty Leading the People (1820).

At around the same time, the American settlers were experiencing the scale and grandeur of the landscape and responded to it accordingly. The Hudson River School, which began around 1825, saw artists producing monumental canvases which had the same kind of Romantic spirituality that James Ward had been exploring twenty years before.

In the nineteenth century, the Salon sent some of its art students to Rome to draw inspiration from the Classics of antiquity; these artists would become inspired by the idea of working from nature.

Gordale Scar was painted by James Ward for Lord Ribblesdale, a Yorkshire landowner. Ward wanted to convey something of the primordial magnitude of the British landscape, protected by the metaphoric cow as a surrogate ‘John Bull’. There is also a sense of the sublime captured in its monumental scale.

With the rise of steam travel, artists could travel further afield and experience different kinds of landscape – from the pastoral to the majestic. Along with ideas of the sublime, the magnitude of scale and the drama of the elements could create a sense of awe and wonder in the viewer. Landscape painting could talk about the power of God and the insignificance of man but could also represent the way that man was transforming the landscape in the industrial age. From James Ward’s Gordale Scar to the Pioneers painting the magnificent vistas of the American plains, landscape could begin to act as a metaphor for a spiritual experience.

Due to the development of new dyes in the textile industry, artists’ colour-men could make tube oil paint for the first time, making it easier for artists like Richard Wilson to work on location. Like Constable, many of these landscapes were relatively small studies from nature. These studies would often be brought back to the studio and worked up into completed pictures.

Back in France, the Barbizon School of artists (active between about 1830 and 1870) gathered in the Forest of Fontainebleau to work from nature, taking their direction from Constable’s example that was exhibited in France in 1824. These artists would occasionally include farm workers in their paintings as the middle classes began to reflect on the plight of the workers and the poor. With the development of photography in the early 1820s, with its ability to record nature, landscape artists began to question their role. Some began to reflect on the everyday experience and the importance of the common man. Realism would emerge around 1848, with Gustave Courbet (1819–77) taking centre stage. His landscapes show a much more physical engagement with surface and paint.

Barbara Bodichon (1827–91) was an artist as well as a social reformer and was involved in the Woman’s Suffrage Movement as well as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Despite its name, the Brotherhood also contained women, many of whom were fighting for social change and equal rights, amongst them Barbara Bodichon, Elizabeth Siddall, Jane Morris, Joanna Mary Boyce, Georgiana Burne-Jones, and Lucy Maddox Brown.

At around the same time, members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (founded in 1848) were also going into nature to record the landscape in meticulous detail. But these landscapes would often serve as backdrops to allegorical narratives set in a medieval context.

Impression Sunrise (1872) by Claude Monet (1840–1926) was a painting of the port in Le Havre early in the morning. The title of the work was later used to denigrate the artworks exhibited in the first Impressionist exhibition.

French Impressionism, emerging in the 1860s, would take the idea of plein air painting into a different direction, challenging what the camera could not record. Tube paint became widely available in the 1870s, and rail networks had extended to allow artists to travel further afield. By the 1880s small artistic communities were forming in Glasgow, Newlyn and Staithes, pushing their own take on Impressionism and broad-brush plein air painting.

The Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck gradually moved towards greater abstraction in her painting. In this digital study of landscape, you can see the way she became increasingly interested in the intersection of shapes rendered in a muted palette.

During the nineteenth century, women were still required to be chaperoned and many female artists tended to work with domestic settings. The Nordic countries, however, produced some exciting female landscape painters, such as Betzy Akersloot-Berg (1850–1922), Anna Boberg (1864–1935), Ester Almqvist (1869–1934) and Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946).

If the Impressionists had valued the idea of working directly from nature, the Post-Impressionist artists would return to the studio; they began to move away from the desire to record exactly what was seen and instead chose to orchestrate reality according to their own needs. Two tendencies seem to emerge here. The first, more rational one, explored the idea of organising shapes and colours within the painting. Cézanne would question the notion of perspectival space and monocular vision, while Seurat would question the notion of solidity and colour; objects would be rendered in tiny dots of pure pigment, and this Divisionism or Pointillist approach would be taken into landscape painting. Van Gogh and Gauguin, on the other hand, explored a much more emotional response to the landscape and colour. Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard also introduced much more decorative tendencies, flattening and bending pictorial space. Paintings no longer had to act as a window onto the world; they could reflect their own reality and that of the artist too. Colour could be bold and layered, textured or flat to give formal coherence to the artwork.

An artist like Pierre Bonnard would make tiny compositional drawings in pencil and create paintings from them, using his imagination to put the colours down that made pictorial sense.

The Russian painter Alexej von Jawlensky was originally trained in the Realist tradition under the great Ilya Repin before he moved to Germany where he met Kandinsky and formed part of Die Brücke – breaking away from traditional tonal rendering in favour of something much more aggressive, and summarising the