Aerial landscapes

These landscapes depict the land from above. Some aerial landscapes have the viewpoint looking straight down from above, so the painting’s all land and no sky. Others have the viewpoint looking across, so the artist can see both the land and the sky, but from a much higher viewpoint. Artists travel in airplanes, hot air balloons, helicopters and other modes of aerial transport to get their aerial viewpoints for their paintings.

Inscapes

Inscapes are an artist’s depiction of their mind as a three-dimensional space. These paintings are usually somewhat abstract or surrealist and can be quite psychoanalytical in nature.

Riverscapes

The focus of these paintings is rivers and the various features that run alongside them. These paintings can also focus on smaller bodies of water, such as streams and creeks.

Seascapes

Seascapes depict the sea or the ocean and its different features. They can include features found along the coastline, such as cliffs and beaches.

Moonscapes

These paintings depict the surface of the moon. They can focus entirely on the lunar landscape, or they can include distant views of the Earth, Sun and stars.

Cityscapes

The focus of cityscapes is cities or any sort of sprawling urban development. Though cityscapes can include some features similar to landscapes – you might include a natural setting such as a park, for example – the focus is on the buildings that make up the city.

Townscapes

Townscapes are pretty much the same as cityscapes, except they depict towns instead of cities. Like cityscapes, the focus is on the town’s buildings.

Skyscapes

These focus on the sky and its different features and formations. The colours of the sky are a key feature of this type of painting. Unlike cloudscapes, skyscapes do not necessarily have to include clouds or the land, though some do.

Cloudscapes

Unlike skyscapes, cloudscapes are all about the make-up and features of clouds. They usually include the land and the artist’s viewpoint is from the ground looking up at the clouds. Though the land is often included in cloudscapes, the focus is on the clouds.

Hardscapes

Hardscapes focus on manmade structures that cover the ground. In other words, hardscapes don’t feature any exposed natural features of the ground, such as soil or grass. In these paintings, everything on the floor is manmade. These can be very similar to cityscapes and townscapes, though they don’t feature parks and other natural features that cityscapes and townscapes may well feature.