Landscapes are the most popular oil paintings, probably because the subjects vary greatly in characteristics, there is an ever increasing concern for the environment, and many painters look forward to the challenge of working outdoors.   You are probably thinking along the same lines.

Landscape oil painting techniques are diverse.  You may use the so-called amateur approach in which you will gobble books on “how to paint landscapes” or you will attend a landscape painting course in which only one approach is taught.  There really is nothing wrong with this approach as long as you do not stop expanding your skills.  As your abilities develop, you create your own landscape painting style.

You may also try the so-called professional approach.  You are most likely a graduate of an art college education and the concepts of color harmony, tonal balance, emotive expression, and originality have been strongly drilled into you.  What you do next is tour art galleries and study paintings that strongly reached out to you.  This activity is akin to research.  Keeping your gallery observations in mind, you begin your own landscape painting.  Gradually you will also develop your own style.

As landscapes increase their popularity, the standards used in evaluating a painting also increase.  For example, an oil painting of a beach may no longer elicit a craving to be bathed in sunlight or to be lulled by winds and waves.  Could there be no more originality?  There is still originality in every beach landscape, even if you are faced with a gallery full of it.  So what, actually, is wrong with a certain landscape painting?

Most landscape paintings remain as oil pictures or images of sloping lands and lone trees.  They lack depth of vision.  What honesty can be depicted in a sloping land and a lone tree that has been there all along but was never been apparent until now?  This is one type of question that you must have an answer before you start sketching.

Sensitivity is another concept that is absent among many landscape paintings.  Think of a horse on a graze land.  As an artist, you would easily see balance and color.  But what would you see if you are a farmer who has just learned that the rains will be delayed?  This is another type of question that you must ask yourself.  How would a scene appear if you look at it with certain preoccupations?
Essentially, the first step of landscape painting is an endeavor of the mind.  The rest of it, strokes, glazes, tones, will follow.