How to Draw a Landscape

In today's video we look at a basic technique for observing and understanding landscape. This simple technique will help you with all your future landscape drawings and paintings. Welcome back to Basics of Drawing series. We've come a long way already. If you're new here it's a good idea that you check out the previous Basics of Drawing videos before you continue. We put a link to them in the description below. And if you want to keep improving your drawing skills you can also subscribe so you don't miss out on any of our new videos. In our opinion landscape is a very difficult and complicated subject to draw. It's a very complex subject full of nuances and complex data. If we want to be able to read and understand it we must first abstract that in our mind and then transfer that on the paper. But we'll show you a simple technique that we always teach our students as well. What we'll show you is an analytical process that will help you better understand the landscape and build upon that understanding. It's like a basic foundation for drawing landscapes that you can later expand with any drawing or painting technique. As an example we'll use a photo reference of a landscape because it's much easier to start with As we said many times the most important step is careful observation. Our task here is to identify the elements that make up this landscape. For example in this image we can notice a road, mountains, fields, trees, hedges and also a forest edge. What we'll do now is look at these and other basic elements of landscape and how to draw them in a simple way. They will not be very realistic at this point. We can divide these elements roughly into two groups surfaces and volumes. This is important to know because it will help with drawing if you imagine a landscape as being composed from surfaces and volumes. Let's start with a tree. You can represent it with a round crown or a so-called habitus and a trunk with a couple of branches. A tree group would look like they have one single common crown and then several trunks supporting it. A forest edge might look like as a continuous mass of tree canopy with some trunks visible on the edge. By the way you can learn more in our video how to draw a tree. We'll drop the link into the description below. A hedge or bushes usually look the same as trees but are smaller and without visible trunks. Any other elements like rocks we represent as jagged clumps. Hills we can draw as simple curved heaps. Mountains are similar but are usually more pointy because of glacial erosion. Now let's look at the surfaces. A street, road or a path we can represent with two parallel lines. If it's facing us then it always looks wider than if it's running horizontally. Anything flat like fields or grassland is basically an area filled with a certain texture. Water we would also draw either as a completely blank area or as an evenly painted dark area. Okay these elements do not necessarily depict how the landscape elements look in nature a hundred percent but they are close enough that when looking at them our brain recognizes them immediately. Now we will use them to draw our view that we already observed before. As always start with a horizon and keep in mind the rule everything above the horizon is taller or higher than us and everything below is shorter than us or lies below us. Keep in mind that you are drawing surfaces and volumes. We usually start by drawing some surfaces. A good idea is to divide the view in your mind into three parts. The layer closest to you, a layer in the middle distance and a backdrop layer far away. First we draw the elements closest to us. That means the path or the road we are standing on and the fields left and right from it. A quick tip unless the path goes uphill it will always remain under the horizon since it's below us. Once we do the first layer closest to us we can move to the middle one in the middle distance. What do we see there? Some single trees, groups of vegetation, hedges and forest edge. You will notice that the observed elements are getting smaller and smaller with the distance. To get their proportions right you can help yourself with a technique called sighting. We did a detailed video on it. You can find a link to it below in the description. Another quick tip here. If the trees are growing from the ground that is the same height as the then the tree trunks always extend above the horizon line. That's because the trees are taller than us and the tree crown starts above our head. Add some shrubs and other smaller volumes as well. We can finish up with the last layer. Since the hills are so far in the distance we do not perceive them in this case as volumes and we can draw them as if they were a flat Behind the hills come the more pointy outlines of the mountains. In the end we can add some extra textures to the vegetation and the fields. There you go. Now we have a basic skeleton upon which you can improve. When you learn to draw trees better you can upgrade them or when you learn to use color you can apply that. But with this technique you will always have a basic system how to understand landscape and furthermore how to start drawing it. And we are also very interested in what aspects of drawing landscapes you are interested in. It's a big complex topic and we would be glad if we could cover the techniques that you want to learn. So do tell us in the comments below. For homework go online and find a landscape image you like and then of course draw it using the same techniques we just learned. And we have one final interesting tip for you. We suggest you pick a cultural landscape, that means cultivated landscape. In our opinion those are much easier to draw since they have so many recognizable patterns in them. That was it. See you next week and keep on drawing. Bye! Nuances.