If you're about to begin a landscape painting, what do you paint first? We're often told to start with the background and then work our way to the foreground. Instructors give this advice because it can help the painter create aerial (or atmospheric) perspective.
It makes sense, doesn't it? One way to create the illusion of distance is to employ the idea of overlap: Closer objects often visually overlap more distant objects. So, if you paint the background mountain first and later overlap the tree in front of it, the viewer's brain will understand that the mountain is farther away.
Unfortunately, in the hands of an inexperienced painter the "background-first, foreground-last" method can lead to a pasted-on look. This is because beginners often fail to pay attention to edge quality, and their foreground shapes especially tend to have hard edges. When they paint something last, rarely is there any further treatment of edges, so hard edges stay hard. Hard edges around a shape visually separate it from the rest of the painting, resulting in something that looks more like a collage than a realistic representation of a landscape.
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