Learn How to Draw a House Landscape: Narrated Pencil Sketch for Beginners

Hi, Tom here, in this week's Circle Line Article video I'll show you one way to sketch a house in a landscape, we can start by drawing a small house in the center, but low down on the paper, the first step is to draw a horizontal line to represent the horizon, the eye level of the viewer, next we can draw the vertical corner of a house in the middle of our horizon line and then we can draw some guidelines from the top and base of this vertical corner of the house and the ends of the line represent the vanishing points in this simple drawing of a house in two-point perspective, next we can draw the left hand side of the house using a simple triangle for the side of the roof and then draw the right side of the house using the guidelines and the vanishing points for all of the receding lines and also keeping the vertical lines vertical, you could draw another smaller building extension on the left hand side in the same way as the first part of the building, at this stage it's a good idea just to check the lines to make sure that the receding lines are actually going towards the ends of the horizon line, so that the house works as a view in two-point perspective, once you have sketched out the house we can add some shading, try to use just a few tonal values when shading, the tonal value of the roof could be just a light tone and then the right hand side of the house we could use slightly more pressure on the pencil point to create a mid tonal value between light and dark and then the cast shadow could be a dark tonal value, for this drawing I'm using a 4B pencil and A4 paper, so the shading is on the right as I was thinking that the light source will be on the left of the drawing of the image, next we can add some windows and doors, because the house is at a distance we don't need to add any real details to these, just a few dark rectangles would be fine, behind the house we could sketch some trees, there would be no need for details as they are far away from us, the viewer, so we can just block in the tonal values, by drawing dark trees behind the house, this will help the left-hand side of the house look brighter, now it is surrounded by dark areas, you could add some more trees getting smaller, shorter as they go and recede nearer the horizon line, next in the foreground, at the very front of the drawing, at the base of the drawing, we could draw a line to represent the edge of a lake or stream and then draw a reflection of the house, just as a series of blocks of tonal values, which mirror the house above, next we can draw some mountains in the background, above the horizon line, near the top of the paper, for this we could use a sharp jagged line for the outline of the distant mountains and then draw some lines going down from the high points of the mountains and these lines going down could be leaning slightly towards the right of the image, next using the side of your pencil, add some shading to the right-hand side of each of the mountain areas, using a light shading tonal value first and then next we could add some darker tonal values on top of the light tonal values that we drew first, but only in some smaller areas, and then we also have the tonal value of the paper itself, the brightness of the paper, once you have the mountain tones blocked in to some extent, you could blend the shaded areas with a pencil, with the side of the pencil, you could use a blending stump, which looks like a pencil, but it's a rolled up paper and it's good for blending, or you could just use your finger to smudge the tonal values to make them more subtle, next we could draw a soft outline above the mountains for a bank of a cloud in the distance and then we can add some shading to this, using the side of the pencil, nice soft shading again, so in this drawing the darkest areas are in the foreground and the lightest areas are in the background, that will help create a sense of distance, the last step is to decide if you would like to keep it as a sketch or work into it slowly to quieten down the mark making and smooth out the tonal values, you could use an eraser to brighten the areas that have become too smudged, so that they are sharp and light, the next stage is to consider adding a few details to your drawing, nothing too sharp, maybe we could reintroduce some sketchy lines or some pathways, some narrow pathways going towards the mountains from the house and finally we could add a person next to the house to give the drawing a sense of scale, once we draw a small person then the house will look larger and the mountains will look much larger, in relation to the scale of the person, as long as they're small and they're small because they're at a distance from us, the viewer, for this drawing I use a 4B pencil and A4 paper, if you'd like to learn more about how to draw from scratch, please visit my website www.circlelineartschool.com to keep up to date with all of my online drawing courses, art books and free video tutorials, I post a new video each week, please subscribe to my youtube channel www.circlelineartschool.com to keep up to date, thanks for watching and see you next time!