For this exercise we must choose a view of either “hard” or “soft” landscape. This can be interpreted as urban or pastoral, or even broader if we observe “hard” or “soft” structures such as rocks or buildings, bridges and etc.

Before doing my own soft and hard landscapes I looked for good examples of “hard” and “soft” Landscapes done by various artists. All the images below are from the french art magasine LArt de l`Aquarelle, #45.

Below in the first row are 3 paintings of Canadian artist Will Yang, from left to right:

“Car gill Grain Terminal”, aquarelle on paper; “Exquisse”, aquarelle on paper; “Burrard Dry Dock Pier”, aquarelle on paper; These works which describe industrial seascapes I consider as a good representation of “hard” looking lanscape.

Some “soft” lanscapes are below. The large photo from the left is a painting done by a Polish artist Adam Rapke, “The valley I have never been to IV”, aquarelle on paper.

upper right : Nicholas Poullis (France), “Montagnac”, aquarelle on paper;

lower right: Chang Hong-Bin (Taiwan), “Mountain trail after rain”, aquarelle on paper;

Below is y study of hard landscape. Actually, it took a while for me to find a hard landscape which would be inspirational to paint. There is a large parking lot I visit everyday and one day I had discovered there a special firefighting training booth: it was designated to recreate some exact conditions of the fire inside the building to train the firefighters to enter a completely dark smoke full space. The black door and black space through the open door inside the booth looked very intriguing and didn’t look soft at all. The greyish ambiance of the parking lot was also hard looking. Thus I painted the booth as a centre of my hard landscape study. I used a grey shade PastelMat pastel paper and soft pastels by Sennellier.
The Black hole ( pastels on paper)

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