Drawing Tutorial – How to draw landscapes or background scenery – INTRO

Fear of the great outdoors ?
It´s a matter of perspective, you know. 😉

Want to know how to draw landscapes or background scenery ?
Looking for online drawing lessons on how to draw scenery backgrounds ?
If you browse most amateur drawing galleries on the web it won´t take much time before you notice that one of the things where people have the most dificulty when rendering a drawing is adding a background.
Particulary a landscape or scenery background.
Not many try, and most of those who are brave enough end up stuck somewhere.

There are thousands of drawings on those galeries but most of the time people stick to drawing characters only and rarely we see an amateur illustration with a great landscape complementing a figure, much less we find many landscape-only drawings around. Why ? Because people tend to think creating a scenery is very difficult due to the dreaded fear of perspective.

So let me show you how you can avoid all that and let you know how to draw, perhaps that imaginary children book landscape you always wanted to do but never thought you had the talent.
Stick with me, but be warned this is going to be a long and detailed post. 😉

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INTRO

Are you looking at me ?…

You cannot escape it. No matter where you look you´ll find perspective staring back at you. The big diference between people who know how to render that on a paper and those like you who probably don´t, is that most of you don´t even notice perspective happening all around you in your ordinary life. Things were always there and they always will be, and of course you know if an object is far from you, it looks smaller and seems bigger the closer you get to it. But then things get more complicated.

If you´re looking straight at an object in the distance, (let´s say a house), and that house is right in front of you, when you walk straightforward towards it, the house gets larger as you get closer but its facade generaly still has the same shape, you saw in the distance, only bigger. And generaly the horizon line gets lower.

The problem starts when you get too close to the facade of the house. As you get near the house you see that the lines of its shape change at your eyes, the details increase and you get more choices where to look at.
You notice that, not only you can look at the house straightforward but as you are smaller in height to the architecture, you can even look up to it and see even more features revealed…by the perspective.
The same perspective that changes relatively to the observer as you move along in relation to an observable feature.
Note that now you can look up at the roof and see new lines that pull that shape of the roof behind the house into an unseen vanishing point and that enables you to look under that roof in this example. Same 3D effect on thewindow.

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If you want to create a cool landscape first of all you should start by deciding what type of view you are going to use, because once the process starts you can make some serious errors in your drawing if you try to correct or change that type of view later on.

So first, imagine that you´re inside your paper and decide if you´re going to look at your landscape illustration from below, from above or straight at it.
Maybe you´re at the bottom of a castle tower looking up, or flying above the clouds looking down. Or maybe you´re on plain looking straightforward at a farm house.
Essentialy you have to choose your view and be the eyes of the person wich will look at your scenery when it´s completed.

You can create something at eye level where all the vanishing points (more on this ahead) are located at eye level and where the amount of sky and ground area is more or less the same like you see on the pic below.

You might decide you´re actualy looking down at your landscape and so the lower you look at, the less sky area you can see as the horizon line in your sketching goes higher almost to the top of the canvas.

This is what gives the first illusion you´re looking down. As you see more of the ground than of the sky as it happens in reality.

If you´re into radical drawing experiences, you can even eliminate the sky area totaly and create a pic where people are really, really looking down, but i wouldn´t advise it if you´re just begining.

Having a horizon line to place your vanishing guiding points is not only useful but trully mandatory if you know nothing about creating a scenery.

And of course, if you´re going to do something with a vast scale looking up, maybe a fantasy illustration where the sky is the main element, the more you look up the less ground you see and the more sky area you have to work on.

Notice that independent of the fact that you look up, down or straight ahead if you place an object at the horizon you can still be looking straight at it at the same time if you choose to make it so.
Once again, this has to do with perspective.

Keep on reading.

Next –  “Little House on the Grid“