Stock Pond is based on a scene I discovered near South Fork, Colorado, in July of 2023. One of the pleasures of being a landscape painter is that painting gives you a license to roam, and I often find subjects simply by exploring dirt roads and seeing where they lead. This particular road brought me to a quiet stock pond with water in the foreground, trees and bushes through the middle ground, and a steep mountainside beyond, where patches of pine and aspen give way to areas too rugged to support much vegetation. In the distance, blue mountains provide another layer of depth.

What I particularly like about this scene is that it reminds us that a good painting doesn't always have to begin with a spectacular subject. Many people might drive right past a place like this without giving it a second look, but interesting compositions can be found in surprisingly ordinary places if we learn to look for them. In this case, the landscape already provided a strong arrangement, so I stayed fairly close to the composition in the reference photograph.

In this tutorial, we'll use those clear divisions of foreground, middle ground, and distance, along with changes in value and color, to create a convincing sense of space. If you'd like to paint along with me, a downloadable copy of reference photograph IMG_7319 is available inside the tutorial.

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