Starter pack - pozdní léto

Late summer on a model meadow

The close of summer has its own shade in the countryside. The greenery is no longer fresh and passes into yellow and ocher, mown fields show stubble and unmown field boundaries, by contrast, grow over. This set of four growths is put together for exactly this moment of the year and makes it possible to capture it without mixing materials from different sources.

The first pair forms a contrast between care and neglect: a low mown meadow with a short, dense and lighter surface against an unkept area that is taller, coarser and irregular. Beside them stand two steppe growths. One is spring, that is, greener and finer, the other semi-dry, visibly dried out to a straw color. It is the last one that carries the character of an August afternoon most strongly.

Putting the areas together

A scene looks most natural when the materials do not alternate in squares but grow into one another. It has proved itself to lay a continuous meadow area first, tear openings into it and reveal the drier steppe surface in them, as if the grass had burnt away there in the sun. The edges are never left straight. The transition to the edge of a path or to the foot of a wall can be finished off with a brush and a little earth pigment.

The small things that sell a scene

A mown area calls for a trace of the work: a narrow strip of stubble along the field boundary, a small heap of gathered grass, a wheel track from a tractor. The unmown part, by contrast, takes a tuft that grows over a fence or leans against a low wall. These details take a few minutes and decide whether the finished area looks like a meadow or like a green tablecloth.

The greener spring component in the set is no distraction, quite the opposite. Damper places by ditches and in the shade of buildings stay green even when the rest of the meadow is scorched, and without it the scene would come out monotonous.