How To Draw A Landscape Using Coloured Pencil!

So I'm using Clairefontaine Pastelmat for this piece because it allows me to add multiple layers in comparison to some other types of paper and this paper also allows me to add light colors on top of dark colors quite easily and I found that when I'm blending with solvent the colors are actually really bright on this paper and it fills the tooth of the paper quite quickly so it is a little bit less grainy looking. You can do this technique on other papers as well but you may need to have a few more layers of colored pencil to achieve the same sort of saturation level as this paper does. So some of the other papers that I like to use are hot pressed watercolor papers so I like the brand Arches or Arsh I'm not sure how you pronounce it and I've been recently using the Canson Me10s pastel paper so not the touch or text version just the normal pastel paper and I'm using the smooth side of it. So there are some different options that you can use but basically whatever your favorite paper for colored pencil is will be fine for this just make sure that it's one that you can use solvent with. So when you're drawing landscapes in general try not to put the horizon line right in the middle and this is mainly just to help create a more pleasing composition so when you think about the rule of thirds you want to have the horizon line be a little bit more towards the top third or the bottom third depending on whether you want the sky to be the main sort of focus or if you want the foreground to be the main sort of focus. In this case I don't have a specific horizon line that goes straight across but the main focus is on the mountains and the sky so the bottom third is the foreground and the top two thirds are the mountains and the sky. So in the base layer I'm just trying to block in the main colors that I can see throughout the entire piece and I tend to use a lot of the Derwent drawing pencils when I can and these Derwent drawing pencils only come in a set of 24 I believe but I really like to them on the pastelmat because they blend out really really bright and vibrant and I just find that they're really opaque when you blend them out with solvent on this specific paper but because there's only 24 colors in that set you're not going to be able to get every color that you need so I'm trying to use the Derwent drawing where I can and then if I can't find that color in that set I'll just use any other sort of pencil that I have so I'm using the Caran d'Ache Luminance which is a sort of wax based pencil which tends to blend out a lot more vibrant as well. So I'm kind of just looking for the abstract shapes for this base layer so I'm not worried too much about any of the detail or anything like that and also another benefit to working on this paper in comparison to a smoother paper is that you don't have to be super neat with your pencil strokes so you can see that I'm being really quite messy with my strokes here and it really doesn't matter that much because when you blend it out with the solvent it will blend quite nicely whereas when you're working on other kind of smoother papers you tend to have to do kind of really small overlapping circles with a really sharp point on your pencil to be able to fill in the graininess of the paper but with this one you can have a little bit of a blunter pencil and you can be a little bit more messy with your strokes. So when you're drawing landscapes in general just remember that the sky is slightly darker towards the top and then it gets lighter towards the horizon line and if you have things like mountains like I do they're going to be more blue and have a lot less contrast the further away they are so the mountains that are closer to us are going to have darker shadows brighter highlights and be a little bit less blue and I want to save the darkest shadows and the brightest highlights for the foreground. So you can see when I start to blend with the solvent it really makes that color pop out and it makes it much more saturated and vibrant. I've got it in a little jar to the side there and the reason that I do that is mainly because it's easier to open and close that jar and when you come into your artwork try to dab off some of the excess before you go onto your artwork just on some paper towel to the side because you really don't need that much to blend it out and once you've blended your entire drawing just give it a few minutes for it to dry completely because you don't want to come into your paper while it's wet with another layer of pencil because that can damage the tooth of the paper quite easily. So I usually wait about 30 minutes and that's probably excessive you probably don't really need to wait that long but that's how long I usually wait when I'm working with solvent just in case. So if you're a little bit stuck with what colors to choose or what to work on first when you're doing something like this something that I do is to and this is in every layer I do the same thing with every layer that I'm doing is that I look at my reference photo and pick a color that looks really obvious to me and then I add that color to the area that I saw it in on the reference photo and then I will look at that photo and see if there's anywhere else that I can use this same color while I've got it in my hand and then I will do the same with the next color. So for example the really dark greens were standing out to me so I picked that really dark kind of green color and went into all the areas where I could see that color and then I will pick the next most obvious color to me and do the exact same thing to that. So another great tip for working on landscapes is that grass has multiple different shades of green so instead of coming through with just one color green for all of the highlights and a slightly darker green for the shadows try and add in different shades of green different kinds of colors so I'm also going to be adding in different colors as well like yellows blues browns reds that kind of thing into the grass as well just to make it look a little bit more interesting and a little bit less sort of flat and keep in mind that you won't see every little tiny detail on the entire piece especially on landscapes because you've got that depth in the piece so the mountains that are really far away you're barely going to see any detail on those at all but as the mountains come a little bit closer you can kind of see a little bit of the texture of the trees so you're not going to see every individual tree but you will see a little bit more detail when it comes a little bit closer to you and then you'll have the most amount of detail with the things that are closest to you so to help create that depth in the piece you want to make sure that most of your detail is towards the front of the piece or the area that's closest to you and you're not adding too much detail on the areas that are further back so when you're drawing trees for example even on the areas that are closest to us because the trees are so small you're not really going to be able to see any of those branches specifically they're more just like abstract shapes and colors so even though the trees in the foreground are close to us because of the size of this piece you're really not going to see that much detail so try and look at it as an abstract shape and abstract colors rather than thinking about it as a tree so the thing that's going to make this look a little bit more realistic is the values rather than the amount of detail that you add so by values i just mean how dark your darks are how light your lights are and everything in between and that's the same with pretty much any subject that you're working on having your values right is really important to making something look realistic and a really great way to check to see if your values are right is to actually take a picture of your artwork change it into black and white and then get your reference photo and do the same thing and then compare them side by side this way you'll actually be able to see how dark your shadows are in comparison to the reference photo because you're taking out that aspect of the color so this is a really great way to check if your values are correct and then adjust them on your own piece if they're not i talk about this in a lot of my videos but the two main things that i believe make something look realistic are the values and the proportions a lot of people tend to focus on getting the right colors or adding as much detail as they possibly can to try and make something look realistic and those things are not what you need to focus on to make something look realistic for example if you go to a museum or an art gallery and you look at those really beautiful paintings that look really realistic from a distance but then when you go close all you can see are brush strokes and sort of abstract shapes there's no real detail there but when you stand back your eyes kind of fill in the gaps and it looks like it's got a lot of detail there so the reason that these look realistic is because the proportions are right and the values are right so you can translate that into colored pencil and pastel and dry mediums as well i tend to not add super tiny details i tend to take a step back from my artwork and look at it from a normal viewing distance to see if i can actually see the detail that i'm adding and if i can't see that detail that i'm adding then it probably doesn't need to be there landscapes are actually really great subject to do if you're new to art or new to the medium that you're using because you don't have to focus on the drawing being perfect it doesn't really matter if the trees are in the wrong spot or if the mountains are a slightly different shape because no one's going to know whereas if you're drawing a portrait for example and the eyes are slightly off it looks really obvious and flowers and plants are also another great subject that is quite similar to landscapes you can click on the video in the top left corner to see how i created these blossoms using colored pencil in this one i show you the most underrated colored pencil techniques to improve your drawings so click on that and i'll see you over there