Painting The Haze Of Hot Summer Days

How to convey a hot and hazy day in art and illustration?

Edges are soft, especially the horizon (or anything in the distance. The colour palette becomes more analogous. Highlights are high key. Blues and purples may be used to depict landscapes in the distance.

Peder Severin Krøyer (Danish painter) 1851-1909 Fisherman On The Beach At Skagen 1891

Petros Malayan (Armenian painter, 1927 Baku – 1997 Tel Aviv-Jaffa) Birds’ Arrival 1967

Willem Van Hasselt (Dutch, 1882-1963) Arcachon, The Basin

Midsummer Theodor Kittelsen 1908

‘Cessnock in Summer,’ (1938), William Crosbie (who was influenced by French Surrealists)

‘Tonalism was an artistic style that emerged in the 1880s when American artists began to paint landscape forms with an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist. Between 1880 and 1915, dark, neutral hues such as gray, brown or blue, often dominated compositions by artists associated with the style.’ (Wikipedia)

Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett (Australian artist and a key member of the Australian tonalist movement) 1887-1935.

Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett

Philip Wilson Steer, children on the beach at Étaples (1887)

Philip Wilson Steer ‘Tired Out,’ Suffolk Coast 1884

Joaquim Sorolla (1863-1923) Spain

Day of Yellow Flowers (detail), 1956 Tom Lovell (1907-1997). This illustration uses the palette of an outside hazy day.

Vyacheslav Fedorovich Shumilov ( 1931 – 2004) Spring, 1966

Richard Edward Miller (American painter) 1875-1943

Spring in Italy (1890) by Isaac Levitan

Stonehenge (1909) by Albert Goodwin (English, 1845-1932)

Sunshine and haze (1915) by Charles Courtney Curran (American, 1861-1942)

Daniel Gaeber (1880 – 1958) Primavera al Villaggio, 1920. For more paintings and drawings of villages, see here.

‘Early Morning, Newlyn’, Dod Procter, oil on canvas, 1926. This one is a picture of an early morning, but utilises the same hazy purple palette as some of these other paintings set later in the day.