Landscape Sketching Basics: From Choosing a View to Three Planes

Landscape drawing is about choosing

A real view holds sky, hills, buildings, trees, power lines and people all at once. Try to copy all of it and you will not only run out of time but lose track of what the drawing is meant to show. The first step in landscape sketching happens with the eyes rather than the hand: deciding what goes in and what stays out. Saying in one sentence what caught your attention makes the decision easier. Once you know whether it is a sunlit roof, a road stretching away or overlapping ridgelines, everything else can be handled simply as support for it.

Composition first, with thumbnails

Before the main drawing, sketch two or three compositions smaller than your palm. These little drawings are called thumbnails. With no detail, just big shapes split into light and dark, you quickly see how much the same place changes depending on whether you frame it wide or tall and whether the horizon sits high or low. Looking through a rectangular hole cut in card, or framing the view with your thumbs and forefingers, also helps you decide what to include.

• Avoid a horizon that cuts the picture exactly in half
• Place the main subject a little off centre
• Look for roads or rivers that lead the eye inward
• Check that no large object is awkwardly cut off at the edge

Split the space into three planes

The simplest way to give a landscape depth is to think of it in three layers. The foreground holds large, textured things close to you, such as grass, a fence or rocks; the middle ground holds the main subject, such as a house or tree; the background holds ridgelines or sky. If all three are drawn with the same darkness and the same detail, the picture looks flat. Usually the foreground is darkest and most detailed, the background palest and simplest, and the strongest contrast goes in the plane with the main subject. If there are buildings or roads, set the horizon height first and line up your vanishing points, and the size relationships between planes will look natural.

Paler with distance

Distant hills look paler and bluer than near ones because the air in between scatters light. This is called atmospheric perspective, and you can use it in pencil too. Draw far ridgelines with a single light layer and soft edges, the middle distance a little darker, and the foreground with your deepest darks next to untouched white paper for the highest contrast. Resisting the urge to draw distant detail matters more than you might think. Draw every window on a far-off building and the building will seem to jump forward.

Keeping trees and woods simple

Start drawing a tree leaf by leaf and you will never finish, and the result looks like flat wallpaper. Squint and a tree resolves into a few big masses of foliage, gaps of sky between them, a trunk and the heavier branches. Get the overall silhouette first, keep the masses facing the light bright and put shadow on the opposite and lower sides, and they gain rounded volume. A hint of leaf texture along the edges of the masses and at the border between light and shadow is enough. Treat a wood as one large mass rather than many trees, and pay attention to the jagged shape of its upper edge.

Values of sky and ground

Outdoors on a clear day the sky is usually the lightest area and the ground darker. Reverse that and a daytime scene looks wrong. Rather than outlining clouds, lightly shade their lower, shadowed side and leave the upper part as white paper, and they gain volume. Reflections in water read as water when drawn a little darker and softer than the objects themselves, with short strokes parallel to the horizon. Never look straight at the sun while drawing the sky, and when sketching for long in strong sunlight, use a hat and shade to protect your eyes and skin.

Drawing outdoors

Outside, the sun keeps moving, so the direction and length of shadows change noticeably within an hour or two. Note the shadow direction with a small arrow when you start and stick to it until you finish. Depending on weather and location, bring the following.

• A small folding stool or mat and a firm drawing board
• Two or three pencils, a sharpener, an eraser and clips
• Water, a hat and a layer suited to the season
• A spot that is not private land and does not block a path
• In remote places, go with someone or let someone know where you are

Common mistakes

Beginners tend to fill the whole page with the same effort. When everything is equally dark, the eye has nowhere to rest and nowhere to settle. Other common slips are drawing distant hills so dark that they come forward, or tilting the horizon so the ground seems about to spill out of the frame. Deciding on the main subject, putting the darkest dark and the brightest light together there, and resolving to draw everything else one step less will avoid most of these. When you finish, step back, squint and check that the three planes read separately.