Sketchbook Ideas - Landscape Drawing

Landscape offers a vast range of possibilities for the visual artist.

• Use a viewfinder (cut in card, or an empty 35mm slide)to find a composition.
• How many different views can you find within the scene? Try landscape, portrait and square formats.
• What is most compelling about the view? Focus on a single point of interest.
• Record detail - bark texture, leaves, bricks. Render a speckled pebble in colored pencil, or the veins on a leaf in pen.
• Focus on perspective - where is the vanishing point for each set of parallel lines?
• Look for a human element for scale and interest
• Tell a story: what has just happened in the landscape? What is about to happen?
• Lanscape includes the urban environment. Draw a cityscape, or an interesting wall with years of overlaid posters and graffiti.

LANDSCAPE DRAWING PROJECT

Record the progession of time within a certain view. You might even record the passing seasons. For this, if you can, mark your viewpoint (take a photo identifying your position) so that you can return to the same spot each time. You can also record the changes over a single day. Consider light, time and season and the changes they create. Take care establishing your composition with the first composition. What has changed? What remains the same? As well as variations of elements within the scene (people coming and going, changing shadows etc), think about light and tone, color, mark-making and texture, as a means to express the changes you observe.

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