When an artist is out in nature, the urge to create a landscape drawing is almost instinctive because it is such a rewarding and useful way to make art. Rewarding in that you are able to soak up the elements around you—whether you are focusing on how to draw a beach scene or how to draw a city you are visiting—and rewarding because drawing landscapes can lead to a great deal of artwork including formal studio paintings, a series of drawings, and more.
If you are eager to foray into nature and create art, this free eBook is a smart and unique place to start because you can learn how artists and instructors approach drawing landscapes. Learn from their experiences so you can make the most of your time drawing landscapes!
Learn the importance of honing your ability to concentrate when you are learning how to draw landscapes.
Plus, along with these free lessons you’ll also receive a free membership to our Artist Daily community. This membership provides you with access to our free techniques, blogs, and newsletter; plus you’ll gain the help and support of thousands of artists of all abilities.
Learn How to Draw Landscape
Drawing the Landscape by John Hulsey
Hulsey teaches you:
-The importance of honing your ability to concentrate when you are drawing landscapes.
-The pros of using pastel as your chosen medium when drawing landscapes.
-How to manipulate color and texture with pastels, so you can pack light when you decide to take your work outdoors.
-How to choose the right surface for your experiments.
-What goes into drawing water in your chosen landscape scene.
Landscape Drawing Demo
Hulsey offers a step-by-step drawing lesson, from thumbnails in a sketchbook to compositional strategies for sketching a landscape with a strong point of view, blending elements of sky, and more.
Hulsey also explains the most important aspect of drawing landscapes—how to carry and store your work so that it remains intact and undamaged when you are in transit and on the go.
Draw Landscapes from on-site Sketches
Capture a Sense of Place by Gerald F. Brommer
Brommer is an expert at mimicking the vitality and sense of liveliness of a place in his pen-and-ink sketches and he explains how to capture a sense of place with on-site travel sketches.
You’ll see how Brommer manipulates scale to emphasize architectural feature or crows of people, how he combines natural elements like flowers and trees in a garden with manmade structures to capture the complexity of the cities he visits. Brommer also explains his unique ways of working when deciding how to sketch a city, including finding vantage points that can be difficult but rewarding—like the curb of a busy street.
Brommer also delves into his methods of working when he doesn’t have a lot of time to work, including sketching a lot but making no effort to create highly finished European drawings. Instead, he did quick and sketchy pen-and-ink works and decided to add watercolor washes to the works once he was back in his studio, with surprising and enchanting effects. He also offers lessons on creating line sketches with minimal shading and the materials that he believes best suits this kind of art-making.
An Exercise on Seeing the Forest Not the Trees by John Hulsey and Ann Trusty
Drawing trees is a crucial part of sketching a landscape because these are a ubiquitous part of the scenes you will likely see.
You’ll find strategies for drawing trees including, “See, Simplify, State,” which is an artistic mantra on avoiding getting caught up in leaf detail and texture when drawing trees. Instead, when you are drawing landscapes and trees come into view, you’ll learn why you want to focus on the overall large shapes of the trees to do them justice in your art.
Get expert techniques in these landscape drawing lessons.
There is so much for a person interested in drawing mountains, sketching a city, and creating a landscape to learn. You’ll fuel your creative energy by seeing how several great artists work in the landscape and how their strategies allow them to get the most out of drawing landscapes—and you can do the same!