Travel oil sketching is not a simple on-site painting practice, but an important way to reshape painters’ personalized artistic style and break the rigid stylization of studio creation. Long-term closed studio creation makes painters easily fall into fixed color formulas, repetitive brushwork habits and single composition modes, resulting in stylized and homogeneous works lacking vitality and personality. Travel sketching takes diverse unfamiliar natural landscapes, urban customs and regional features as creative objects, forcing painters to abandon fixed creation thinking and capture unique light, color and scene characteristics in different regions, so as to form personalized painting language and aesthetic temperament. Different regional landscapes bring completely different color perceptions: coastal areas are dominated by fresh blue and gray tone systems with strong light reflection and transparent air; mountain inland areas are dominated by thick earth tones and green tones with heavy atmosphere and strong color saturation; ancient town scenic areas are dominated by retro mottled tones with unique historical texture. In the process of on-site travel creation, painters need to adjust brushwork speed, color matching logic and composition mode according to real-time scene changes, forming flexible and changeable brush traces and unique tone preferences that cannot be cultivated in the studio. In addition, travel sketching enables painters to integrate regional cultural characteristics and natural customs into creation, endowing works with unique regional emotional connotation and cultural marks. Many famous oil painting masters’ personalized styles are derived from long-term travel sketching experience: some are good at fresh coastal tone expression, some are proficient in thick mountain texture depiction, and some are skilled in retro ancient town atmosphere rendering. Continuous travel sketching accumulates unique visual memory and color reserves for painters, gradually eliminating homogeneous creation habits and forming distinctive personalized artistic styles.
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