How I Paint Smoky Mountain Landscapes 4 Paintings, 1 Technique

Hi, I'm Ashley, a full-time artist working out of my studio and gallery in downtown Bryson City, North Carolina. Living here means I'm surrounded by endless inspiration from the Great Smoky Mountains. I love painting inspired landscapes in all kinds of styles and sizes and I've done quite a few over the years. In this video, I'm showing you how I paint simple, layered mountain landscapes that look amazing on their own, but also double as quick studies for my These little landscapes are painted on 5x7 canvas boards using acrylic paint. To start, I tape several of them to a piece of cardboard so they stay put while I work. That way I can paint multiples at once without anything shifting around. I start with a base coat using light blue and white to block in the sky and as I'm painting, I'm making a point to not make it completely uniform. Some areas have more blue and other areas a little more white where there might be the suggestion of clouds. From there, I build the mountain range back to front. I'll paint the farthest layer in first. In real life, these distant peaks tend to read as a dusky blue or a grayish purple. I work in some white here too to capture that signature smoky mountain haze. Once that layer dries, I move to the second farthest range using a deeper, dusky blue, again blending in white for that soft, atmospheric look. The Great Smoky Mountains aren't actually smoky, they just have a natural fog that's created by our area's dense vegetation. The Smokies are also a temperate rainforest, which means that heavy moisture and warm air rising from the valleys forms this dense, rolling fog. So the landscape here is different every single day, and there's so much opportunity for photography and all forms of art inspiration. You can see as I'm painting this layer that I am pulling a little of the bluish gray up into the sky and clouds so that everything feels connected. And here's how it looks at this stage. Next comes a greenish blue layer for the next range forward, still adding touches of white for that hazy effect. Once the distant mountains are dry, it's time for the closer ranges, and I switch to a dark green. I love this deep green from Nova Color, and it thins down beautifully into a translucent wash. For this layer, I keep a spray bottle close by and paint with loose, sweeping, almost erratic strokes to build texture and movement. I'll even scratch into the wet paint with the end of my brush to suggest terrain, and those marks show beautifully once I start adding additional color at a later stage. To bring some warmth into the greens, I reach for a Sepia Liquid Acrylic and Golden's Raw Sienna Fluid Acrylic. Both of these I water down and brush on as a very thin glaze over parts of the green areas. If I'm painting a sunset landscape, I'll have a stack of premixed pinks and oranges ready to add into the sky, peeking out from behind the mountains as the sun sets. I also use a fluorescent red as a thin wash directly on the mountains. It creates a beautiful warm glow, just like the light you'd see during an actual sunset. Once everything is fully dry, I switch to a thin, flat brush and start adding tree and forest detail along the ridgelines. Nothing in this part of the video is sped up, this is really how fast and loose I paint a tree line. Sometimes I'll add in a few larger trees with a small brush, keeping the strokes loose and abstract. It doesn't take much for it to read as a tree. What I love about these small studies is that they let me experiment before committing to a larger painting. Lighting up the trees, making them a bigger focal point in front of the mountains, or trying out new sky colors and cloud shapes. Every single one turns out just a little bit different. Once everything is dry, I hold a frame up to each piece to figure out where to add my signature. Once the signatures are dry, it's time for a coat of varnish. After the varnish dries completely, I pop them into a simple off-the-shelf 5x7 frame. I just remove the glass and the canvas board fits right in. Every grouping of landscapes I do comes out completely different, and I love seeing how they all turn out. These little studies are such a fun way to dream up bigger paintings and experiment with composition and color. And here they are all finished. If you'd like to see more of my landscapes, check out my Etsy shop. I have prints, a few original paintings available right now, and even stickers, which are a great low-cost way to support a working artist. And if you enjoyed this video, give it a like and consider subscribing. It really helps. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.