Building a Landscape: Step by Step to “Secret Beach”

Discover how artist Justin Donaldson created his plein air oil painting “Secret Beach,” step by step — from initial shapes to final details — in this immersive landscape demonstration set in South Carolina. Justin also paints with gouache, and will be teaching his techniques August 23, 2025, at GouacheLive.com (No tech skills? No problem! If you can click a link, you can join our event!).

Plein Air Oil Painting Demo: “Secret Beach”

By Bob Bahr

Step 1

To start, the artist massed in the big shapes using transparent red oxide. “If I’m painting a subject that’s a bit more complicated — for example, a scene that incorporates architecture — then I go in with more refinement,” he says, “but mostly I just mass in what I’m seeing.”

Step 2

Donaldson proceeded to paint the gradient of color in the water, with an eye on depicting the local color even at this early stage. “I’m trying to get things generally right, but I know on the whole, I am building up relationships,” he says.

This paint layer is thin, with the paint thinned out with equal parts Gamsol and linseed oil. “With that combination, I can come back in the same sitting with more layers, without an earlier layer coming through too strongly. If were to use only Gamsol, I’d end up with a matte finish in the end. Thinning it with linseed lets me retain some of that glossy finish I want, and gives the painting a unified look in the end.”

Step 3

In this stage he continued to build the major relationships in the painting, including the colors in the water. Having grown up in Australia, he is still becoming acquainted with greener and wetter scenes such as this. The two logs extending into the water offered a novel challenge.

“I wasn’t sure at that point how I was going to place them in the painting,” he says. “I’m exploring an area I’m not fully confident about — but I do that. For example, I was unfamiliar with waterfalls, so I painted them a bunch of times and failed a bunch of times. Painting lakes like this is still a bit hit-and-miss for me, so I am exploring.”

Step 4

The sand of the beach was Donaldson’s next focus. “My major concern for the sand was to get the gradient of it from lighter in the back to darker in the front, and from lighter on the left to darker on the right,” he says. “I wanted to capture the overall look rather than surface-level details at this stage. There are so many colors in the sand, including titanium white, cadmium red deep, a touch of cadmium red, a touch of ultramarine blue, and ivory black.”

Donaldson also added the characteristically Southern red dirt patch on the upper right, which pops against the greens of the background trees.

Step 5

The logs that extend into the water were the next area to tackle. “The logs were very dark, but where they were brightly lit, they were fairly colorful, with blues and reds coming through,” Donaldson says. “I was concerned with the changing color as the logs went deeper into the water. There’s some form and value coming through, but I’m still in the stage of getting big masses and big ideas down.”

Step 6

The artist moved on to depict the striations and texture in the logs. His attention turned to the water, which offered a new challenge — rapidly changing light conditions. “I’m being pretty literal about what I’m seeing, but the light hitting the water was constantly changing,” he recalls.

“It was about color matching. I only had two hours in the early afternoon on an overcast day, and I had to cut it short because a giant thunderstorm was coming through that crashed as soon as I got into the car.”

Step 7

It was time to develop the background trees, and this meant describing them without getting too specific. “I try to go from big shapes to small shapes and be sensitive to where my focus is,” Donaldson says. “My focus here is in the front, so I don’t feel like I need to detail what’s happening in the back. But I was trying to keep the feeling that the foreground and background are in the same universe, to get a level of detail so that nothing feels left behind, yet the focus doesn’t move to the trees.”

The artist concentrated on brushstrokes in the background to create a suggestion of detail, for example, by depicting a few tree trunks. He moved toward “thinking less about the big effects and more about the rocks and some smaller moments.”

Step 8

Donaldson added waves and ripples to the water. He tied the painting together with some light in the trunks of the background trees to modulate the values. The lighter trunks also allowed the deadfall in the middle ground to “have some friends.”

As the storm clouds moved in, the water became darker and had less reflectivity, which the artist depicted accordingly.

Gouache LIVE (August 23, 2025) is about rewiring how you see, think, and create as an artist while giving you a fresh sense of creative freedom, whether you’re picking up gouache for the first time or ready to explore! Maybe you’ve tried oils. Acrylic. Watercolor. But gouache is different. Learn why at GouacheLive.com.

View more contemporary landscape paintings here at RealismToday.com