Start Drawing PART 5 Absolutely the Best Technique for Creating Distance in a Landscape Drawing

Paul Priestley here. This video is part five of my series of art tutorials for beginners on learning to draw. In this tutorial I'm going to show you simply how, by using three tones, you can make a landscape look really three-dimensional. Here we do lots of shading, delicate drawing, bold dramatic drawing. The techniques you'll learn can not only be used to draw a landscape, but any drawing that requires depth and three-dimensionality, such as a still life. Amazing! One technique, at least two applications. Grab your pencils, we've got to draw! In this video I'm going to be showing you how to create a landscape just using three tones to create the depth in the picture. An HB pencil, which is quite a hard pencil, a normal pencil, a 4B pencil, a soft pencil, and an 8B pencil, which is a very soft pencil. In the top right hand corner of my paper I'm going to draw a rectangle. In the first square I'm going to fill it in using my very hard, very soft pencil. Second square I'm going to fill in with my mid-tone pencil. The third square I'm going to fill in with my HB pencil. So I'm just going to label these dark, mid-tone, light-tone, highlight. These are tones. So we're going to sketch the landscape. Now the idea is simply this, everything that disappears into the distance gets lighter, paler, smaller. I'm using my light tone. I'm going to switch to my mid-tone pencil. I'm going to bring in my dark tone. You can see already that the different lines suggest that this is closer to us than that. Now the idea is that anything that I draw in the background here is in the light tone. Anything in the middle ground is the mid-tone. Anything in the foreground is the dark tone. So imagine I'm going to draw some trees on the hill in the background here. I'm just going to do a very simple wiggly line and then fill it in with my light tone. Now you can see here that I've just completed that. I've just filled it in with my light tone. I might want some more trees over on the hill that's even further away so I make them smaller. Now imagine that I might have fields over here. I might have a hedge. Well the hedge starts here. It's going to be very, very light and then as it starts coming down here I'm pressing on very much, very slightly harder. You see. So and it's also getting slightly wider. Now imagine here I might have say a ploughed field. I might have for example over here another little hedge. Now all I'm doing with my light tone is just running my pencil over the edge. Just rubbing it very, very gently. That's all I'm doing. I'm just suggesting. Now imagine now in the middle ground here I have some trees. Now these trees are going to be bigger than the trees further away. So they're going to be taller but they're also going to be darker. So I'm going to draw these with my mid tone. So I'm just going to suggest a few tree trunks and maybe a few little lines just coming off. And then I'm just going to draw a little wiggly line along here but you notice it's quite. I'm going to shade this now using two tones. My mid tone and my light tone. Okay I've done that and I'm going to now suggest a little bit of shadow. Imagine light coming down. So I'm just putting a little bit of shadow underneath here in my mid tone. Now you'll already notice that these areas here because they're drawn with the mid tone look as though in front of the areas behind because the difference in tone but also the difference in size. Size is also important in this respect. So imagine I might have for example a hedge running across here. It's very very small as you can see and again I shade it with my mid tone. Imagine I've got a hedge coming down across here. So I might have we might bring this right down here and we bring it right up to where my dark tone is. So I'm going to press on a little bit harder here. Make it a little bit rougher up here and then gradually it disappears almost to nothing. You see so it's getting bigger. Imagine this is a ploughed field. Now I start here quite lightly but as I get further down I'm going to make it darker. So I'm just going to do this. You'll notice as the lines have come down here they've got darker and stronger and the same applies over here. So you already see now that my fields difference in tone brings them forward. Okay so now imagine that we have a tree here but this tree is in the foreground. This tree I'm going to draw now with my dark tone and you'll notice that the dark tone the tree is so much bigger. My tree trunk I'll start the tree trunk round about here. So I've got my basic tree drawn but look already at the difference in scale between these two and this implies this is so much closer than that. Now the first thing I need to do is start adding my dark tone. Underneath here you can see where the tree trunk is. This is going to be in shadow because the sun's shining across so it's going to be very dark here. So I'm going to start pressing on and doing my tree trunk. Now one of the interesting things about putting all this very dark tone here is that you can immediately see that these tree trunks begin to start disappearing behind the tree, underneath the tree. This area here is foliage. Now imagine the foliage this is big clumps of foliage here. The light's coming down so the bottom of this foliage is going to be very dark. So I'm going to again be using my dark tone. So I'm pressing on but don't do it too neatly it's got to be rough. So you can see I've very roughly blocked in the dark areas of the tree. Now with the mid-tone I start just above and I'm pressing on but not quite so hard this time. And finally we just do a little bit of light tone as well. Now you could also put detail on this and such like but we're not going to worry too much about that for the moment. Now if we go back to the foreground here. If you want to draw grass, draw grass so that it grows up so you're flicking up. But as I come to about here I change pencil. I might also just roughen this area up a and might have a little bit more shadow underneath here. You can now see quite clearly that by using just three different pencils, three tones, dark tone, mid-tone, light tone, change in size. So large, medium, small. You can create a three-dimensional image very simply just using three tones. The same applies with if you're going to create a still life. The still life would be drawn in exactly the same fashion even though the distance between the foreground here and the background there may only be a few inches. You could still use exactly the same technique.