10 Tips for Drawing Water Landscapes in Colored Pencil

Today I will be showing you a time-lapse of this colored pencil landscape and I will be talking about 10 tips for drawing landscapes in colored pencil. Hi, Shanna Rowe-Jackson here from Caution R-Stat Play and today I am going to talk about the 10 things that I like to keep in mind while I am drawing a landscape in colored pencil. So number one, the first thing that I like to think about when I am doing a landscape in colored pencil or just in general is the horizon line. So when I'm sketching out my landscape I usually do my landscapes freehand and when I do I like to place my horizon line first. This is going to be the furthest away point in your landscape and all your atmospheric perspective is going to like depend on this point in your landscape. So it's important to establish your horizon line right off the bat because it's going to help with the rest of your composition and generally speaking I recommend placing the horizon line either a little above or a little below the halfway point. You don't ever want it at the halfway point of the page because it tends to make it a little bit more difficult for the viewer to figure out what they're supposed to be focusing on and it makes it harder for the viewer's eye to kind of circulate through the piece as well as it should and so I always recommend putting it either higher or lower than the halfway point. If it is lower than the halfway point usually the emphasis will be mostly on the sky. If it is higher then usually it's on the landscape or the water depending on what is in the foreground. So number two the next thing that I work on is the sky. Once I start laying in color I always start with the sky first because the sky sets the mood for the rest of the painting and so if it's a blue sky then you know a lot of your shadows are going to have blues in them. If it's a sunset you know a lot of those warm colors are going to be reflecting on the landscape around you and so you want to make sure that you get the sky laid in because it really sets the mood and the tone for the rest of piece and when working in colored pencil I recommend trying to keep a very sharp point on your pencil at all times. Typically speaking the top of the page or the top of the sky is going to be the darker part and the bottom part of the sky is going to be the lighter part. As it gets closer to the horizon which is further away it is going to get lighter. So I usually start top to bottom and I keep my pencil sharp and I use very small circular motions and then as I go further down and I'm about to get into a gradient if I'm about to switch colors I make sure that I lighten my pressure with my pencil even though I'm technically using kind of light pressure to begin with and layers. I just make sure that I keep my pencil strokes light so that way there when I come in with my next color over that part they can blend together more easily and then I can make sure that I haven't ruined the tooth of the paper and I'm able to layer that next color so that I can smooth it out between those two colors. Then I come through with the sky and I like to use some OMS to blend it out. I make sure I have enough layers on there before I do that and once I have enough layers I find it is also easy to continue blending with a soft tool or even a blending stump. So that is another way that I get my my skies to be so smooth. Also when I'm doing my sky I make sure I go around the cloud forms. When I sketch out my landscape I make sure that I have also sketched out a rough shape of the clouds. It doesn't have to be perfect but I like to leave the the white of the paper especially if it's white clouds so I can use the white of the paper to my advantage. As I said it doesn't have to be perfect but once I come in and actually work on the clouds then I can fix the shapes a little bit more and what you're seeing me do here is doing some of that blending. And I'll go back and forth between the sky and the clouds. So number three has to do with the clouds and more specifically the shadows of the clouds. Clouds will pick up light and shadow. They have three-dimensional form to them even though they are vapor and and you know different kinds of moisture and things like that they still have like a three-dimensional form. So you want to pay attention to your light and shadows when you're trying to get the shapes of clouds. And as far as the shadows go I always use grays that are a good mixture between the sky color and some of the landscape below. So if I were to be mixing this in paint I would be mixing a part of that sky color with some of the kind of browns and things like that that are going to be below. The shadows of the clouds almost always have a bit of the sky color in them and that is a great way to make them look more natural. You don't want to just take black and make a shadow on a cloud. You want the colors that are surrounding them to reflect into the shadows of those clouds. It's no different than a shadow on the ground. If it's a blue sky and there's a shadow on the ground usually those shadows take on the blue of the sky. The shadows in the clouds are no different. So you want the blue from the sky in there but a lot of times it's not exactly the blue in the sky because it ends up being a little bit darker. So to make that kind of natural gray I usually take from colors that I know that I will be using in the rest of the composition to kind of pull it all together and create some kind of unity throughout the whole composition. So number four involves distant hills and trees. And as you can see in that mountain in the background it's quite light. It doesn't have a lot of detail and it takes on some of that sky color. So the one that's kind of towards the middle of the page which I keep blocking I apologize. That is the furthest away mountain in the whole scene. That mountain is really far away and it is going to take on the color of the sky. You're not going to see as much detail or contrast because if you are out in a natural landscape you are really far away obviously from the mountains. And so that means there's a lot of air between you and the mountains and that is basically the the basics of atmospheric perspective. The further away something is the less detail it has and the more of the sky color it takes on because there is a lot of molecules and a lot of different kinds of what is the word vapors that is between you and that mountain. And so it's going to take on that color of the sky because there's basically air and sky between you and that mountain. So that is something to keep in mind. Any far away trees, any mountains, anything that's off in the distance will take on the color of the sky and it even happens during sunset. So that's a great way to show distance. Make sure that you don't have high contrast and that you are just putting the color of the sky over those distant trees and distant mountains. So number five. Think of trees as abstract shapes. And I've talked about this in other videos as well and so I don't want to necessarily go into great detail about it. But basically you can put a base color down which is what I'm doing here. I'm actually using watercolor pencils and I'll talk about that a little bit later. But you can put down your base color but then look for the abstract shapes in the trees. And I usually look within the negative shapes of the trees or within the shadows. I like to lay in my shadows first because if I look at the abstract shapes of the shadows and get those drawn in then my positive shapes are already drawn in for me. And it's the shadows that bring out those positive shapes. So once I get all my shadows laid in then I can come over and take my lighter colors of my trees and just color in those lighter colors and details and they'll already be there. And the best way to do it is to just look for clumps. You don't need to draw individual branches or individual leaves. The only time that you are going to draw branches very specifically is when the trees are silhouetted against the sky. And that is in the tallest trees. So if you look and you see the tallest trees they're poking out above the rest. It's less dense and so they're almost just a shadow against the sky. And that's when you're going to look at more specific branches. But even then you're just looking at shapes. You don't have to draw every individual pine needle. You're just going to draw the silhouetted shape against the sky. So that's kind of a two-for-one tip. The trees that are more dense you look for the negative shapes. The trees that are sticking out against the sky are going to be more flat and silhouetted. These are smaller trees but these tips and tricks work well for larger trees as well. Then I can come in with lighter colors and kind of pick out more of those details later. So here you can see kind of a closer up view of how I do the trees. And it's not pretty at this phase but it doesn't have to be. So I'm just going in with those details. I'm looking in between the branches so to speak. And these trees will later on have a little bit more blue in them as well. This part of the these trees are bigger than the other ones because this part of the shoreline is actually closer. Because we're looking out on a pond and so it kind of goes at an angle because this has land all the way around it. So they're almost like diagonally going around the pond and kind of going towards the point of where the mountain is. So these trees are a little bit closer and this shoreline is a little bit closer than the trees on the opposite side which is why they are larger. So that is something to keep in mind. Obviously as I talked about before with atmospheric perspective things that are closer are going to be larger and probably a bit more detailed. Okay so my next tip number six is to use something like watercolor pencils, watercolor, or even pan pastels to kind of fill in the white spaces in larger areas. You kind of saw me do this a little bit earlier when I did an underpainting for my trees but this is just a nice tip to kind of speed things up and to kind of take the intimidation out of having to fill such large spaces with the small tip of a pencil. And so I am just using some watercolor pencils here and I am just going through and kind of getting a basic wash for my water so that way there I can come in on top with my colored pencils and do the details. So number seven deals with reflections. So as you can see there's a top part of the water that is a lot lighter and it's kind of ripply and so there's not a lot of reflections there. It's really only reflecting the color of the sky. However down in the lower part it starts to calm down a little bit and so you're going to be able to see more reflections of the trees. So when I am working on reflections I always want to keep in mind the fact that reflections are going to come straight down from what they are reflecting. They're not going to come out onto the water as an angle. They are going to just come straight down and oftentimes depending on the reference photo they might be the same size but there are times when the reflection will be a little bit smaller than the trees that they're reflecting or a little bit larger depending on what's going on in the water itself and oftentimes the reflections might appear a little bit darker and definitely less detailed than what they are reflecting and this all really depends on the time of day. Like this is a pretty blue sky so for the most part the colors are going to be very similar to the trees themselves but they might have a little bit more blues in them and be a little bit darker. So I'm just making sure that I'm mimicking those shapes. They don't have to be perfect but you want them to be you know lining up with what they're reflecting and of course I am looking at my reference photo and making sure that I am getting them accordingly and so as you can see the trees that are further away not as much of the reflection is showing because there's that ripply part of the water that isn't reflecting anything so it's just really seeing the reflections of the tops of those trees because in this reference the tree reflection is almost the same exact size as the trees themselves so I'm kind of coming down from the shoreline to get that size in there not from where it starts reflecting but from the shoreline itself because as I said there's that ripply water that kind of interrupts that reflection. The clouds will also reflect in the water but they also get really really distorted and so you may even see some of the clouds in the water that aren't in the sky above because they're reflecting from a part of the sky that doesn't show in the composition so just play pay close attention to your reference photo if you're working from one and keep that in mind sometimes the clouds may not line up perfectly because you are seeing parts of the sky in the water that you aren't actually seeing in the picture especially here where there's more water than there is sky and I'm just kind of going in now on that opposite side and working on those reflections again I want to make sure I'm coming kind of straight down I'm trying to keep the size in check you'll you'll see me adjust that a few times and I am also trying to make sure I can get those foreground trees because there's layers of trees there so there's some in the front that are a little bit lighter and there's some in the back that are more dense and that will also show in the reflection itself albeit much more blurry and definitely less detailed and something else to keep in mind when there is a reflection is even though the reflection itself comes straight down you are going to have horizontal lines that interrupt it where the waves are coming through and the ripples in the water kind of interrupt that reflection so I am keeping that in mind as well I am looking at those abstract shapes to try and give that effect that there is rippling water there and also you can see here that I am blending out this reflection a lot more than I blended out the trees because it is less detailed so there's not going to be as much visible like leaves and things like that but also I'm making it darker because this reflection especially is behind the trees and it's not getting as much light and so it's a lot darker than the trees that it's reflecting number eight water just like the sky usually gets lighter as it gets closer to the horizon and darker as it gets further away from the horizon so if you think of water like a mirror image it's going to reflect the lightest part of the sky when it gets closest to the lightest part of the sky and the darker part of the sky as it gets like as it lines up with the darker part of the sky and in this particular image you can tell that because there's so much water you're a lot further away it gets even darker because there's a little bit more shadow so just pay close attention to your reference because the water may end up being darker than the sky is and so you just want to kind of pay close attention to that as well okay so number nine waves and ripples are three dimensional so you want to pay close attention to your light and shadow just like you did with the clouds just like with anything else if you're doing something realistic pay close attention to the direction of light and the direction of the shadow and put that in typically speaking usually most ripples are going to go horizontal especially as they get closer towards the horizon line in this particular piece there's some rippling effects that are going on that are indicative to something having been placed in the water recently and so they're curving out a little bit more when you get closer to the viewer and then as it gets further away it starts to straighten out and become more parallel to the horizon line so that is something to keep in mind usually you're going to have straight lines in your waves but just look at your reference photo and make sure and even within those ripples that are curving out i am not drawing upwards with them i am still using horizontal lines within those waves to kind of get that and kind of stacking those lines very closely together almost like a staircase effect and you can see here i am also doing some reflections of clouds on the water and these clouds in particular are a little bit darker reflections than the clouds that are closer to the horizon line because they are over the darker part of the water and it's closer to the viewer so you're more apt to be able to see a little bit below the surface a little more and it's going to reflect a little less so that's something else to keep in mind when you're working on water as it gets darker as it gets closer the reflections may as well because you're starting to kind of see a little bit more of you know the bottom of that pond kind of showing through a little bit sometimes the colors will show through in this particular image the colors of the floor of the pond don't really necessarily show through as much but that is something to look for in your reference photo okay so number 10 is simply to just relax and have fun landscapes are great because they don't have to be exact if one leaf is out of place most people won't notice there's less pressure than if you're doing something like portraiture to get a likeness and it should just be a great time so be patient with yourself relax and enjoy the process okay so here is the final piece i really enjoyed this piece i actually did this as a commission for a really close friend and it's one of his and his wife's favorite spots and it was really right up my alley i was so excited when he sent it to me so i hope that you enjoyed this video and that you learned a little something what is your favorite aspect of landscape painting or drawing please let me know in the comments below what's your favorite thing to draw that is landscape related all right thank you so much for watching have a great day bye hey guys thanks for watching if you like what you see please hit subscribe also if you're interested in seeing more of my artwork i'm on social media so check out the links in the description below