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Alpine Lake

A snow-capped range over a still lake, painted wet-on-wet from paintkit's brushes alone.

Alpine Lake, snow-capped peaks reflected in a still lake under a criss-cross brushed sky, with evergreens in the foreground
Click the picture for the full-size render.

How it is made

Painted back to front from paintkit's brushes, with no landscape helper. The sky is laid out with pkcrisscross and painted with pkbroad; spray clouds and mist are softened into the paint beneath by pkwet, and the far range wears banks of haze lifted both ways by a directional pkwet; snow comes from pktrowel and the shadow planes from pktrowelplane, both clipped to each ridge; a far forest is tapped in with pkdab; evergreens are pkfan; trunks, grass and water lines are pkliner. The reflection replays the same self-seeded marks upside down, one single-colour part at a time, each pulled straight down with a directional pkwet and then grazed across.

Details

Category
Painting
Tags
landscape
Libraries
artkit, paintkit
Added
2026-10-08
Built in
issue #118
Page size
760 × 560 points

Source

View source the whole program in a scrolling window, or read gallery/alpine_lake.ps on GitHub. To draw it yourself, from a checkout of the repository:

pscat --page 760x560 gallery/alpine_lake.ps
The first 40 of 730 lines of the source 
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Title: Alpine Lake — a wet-on-wet landscape from paintkit's brushes
%%Creator: pscat — issue #118, the wet-on-wet epic's (#112) capstone; reflection pulled in #191
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 760 560
%%EndComments

% A snow-capped range over a still lake, painted the way a wet-on-wet
% landscape actually is: sky first, then each plane of the scene from
% the farthest forward, each one darker, warmer and harder-edged than
% the one behind it, with the lake's reflection pulled in last and the
% foreground bank laid over the shoreline seam.
%
% Nothing here is a landscape helper. Every mark is one of the epic's
% painting tools, and each tool does the job it would on a real easel:
%
%   pkbroad  (#115)  the sky's criss-cross block-in, the earth of the
%                    bank, the horizontal strokes grazed across the
%                    lake and the ripples breaking its reflected snow
%   pkcrisscross (#184)  where the sky's block-in strokes fall
%   pktrowel (#111)  the knife: snow down the lit faces, shadow snow down
%                    the dark ones
%   pktrowelplane (#180)  the shadow planes: the dark faces laid with
%                    overlapping pulls clipped to a triangle (#361), and
%                    laid again, veiled, where the mist crosses them (#476)
%   pkwet    (#113)  clouds, mist and the far forest's crest settled
%                    into the paint beneath them instead of sitting on it;
%            (#181)  directional, the near range's foot lifted into mist,
%                    the far range's banks of haze lifted both ways
%                    (#407), and the whole reflection pulled down
%   pkfan    (#114)  the evergreens' branch tiers, the spires in the
%                    far forest
%   pkdab    (#117)  the far forest's tapped crest, the bushes on the bank
%   pkliner  (#116)  trunks, grass, and the glints on the water
%   pkspray / pkoil  cloud vapour and mist; the lit lip of the bank
%
% The reflection is not a separate drawing. Each scene element is a
% procedure that seeds its own randomness first, and every painting
% step in it logs the random state as it goes, so the lake can replay
% the same marks under a `1 -1 scale` about the waterline, upside down,
% one single-colour part at a time. Each part is pulled straight down

On GitHub