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Donglu Yu reveals that by painting different types of rock formations in nature, you can boost your knowledge of colour, light and volume

- Donglu Yu

I want to share my advice on producing colour studies of different rocks. The goal is to take a logical approach when painting the image, thus streamlining the creative process. I usually spend between 90 minutes and two hours for each colour study, so I need to plan and then use my time efficiently.

I’ll talk about three real-life landscape that feature different types of rocks: canyon rock; shore/beach rock; and river rock. Because of their geographic locations they each have a distinctive visual appearance. For example, canyon rock has the hardest edge transition, while the river rock has the smoothest appearance. This is the key point to remember when depicting their volume, colour and light.

Because I always start my painting process the same way, I’ll talk first about the initial creative steps for tackling those three types of rocks. During the later stages I’ll discuss each natural element that I’ve pictured in my studies.

I’ll also talk about how I use brushes. I’ll paint with different brushes depending where I am in the painting process, and so I’ll explain my choices. Because it’s fun to experiment with the brushes, I hope you can take my brushes as a basic tool and play with their settings to achieve more visual variations.

1 Preparing the canvas