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How to Paint the Faraway in Watercolour and Make it Look Far Away
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4 min readMar 3, 2025
Those faraway hills would be green if we were standing on them. They’d be green in the same way that the grass doggo is sitting on is green.
But because the hills are far away, they look bluish, or greyish, or shadowy.
It’s to do with the way light behaves. The important thing to know is that if distant things are painted that colour the viewer unconsciously knows they’re over there, while we’re still right here.
One of the most useful colours for painting distant things, whether trees, mountains, fields, or buildings, anything-faraway, is what I call ‘shadow-colour’. This is a mix of Ultramarine Blue and Light Red.
