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Landscape Drawing Tutorial

Part Six -“ Endless Worlds

So, basically, this is how you can create a nice-looking scenery using the generic horizon line at eye level.
If you elevated the green hill with the big tree in the foreground, you could even actually change the view a bit, from slightly looking down into a more straightforward view, so you see there are lots you can play with not only with perspective and grid lines but also how you place elements on the view planes.

This is a finished version of the alternate scenery. I exaggerated the size of the big tree that stretches from the middle ground, overlapping the background area, but this is to show you how to build scale using different-sized objects.

If I added details to the big tree and gave it some depth and 3D feel, I could make this element feel less intrusive, but this is a subject for another tutorial, which I´ll be posting as soon as I can finish.

Another thing. Don´t worry about drawing many details in each landscape element you create as you go along.
A good landscape is more like a good collection of less detailed features than a space filled with not so many elements but overly detailed.

When you begin, try to design a landscape in its basic shape structure, then you can start adding details later to those elements that really need to be detailed.
A good landscape always has some key elements that pull the viewer´s attention, and sometimes, you can even use those features to distract the viewer from looking at some of your mistakes in the drawing.

If you have a pic filled with detailed vital elements, they get lost, and your scenery, as much pretty as it can be, becomes bland and dull because it´s the little and carefully placed touches that give it life.
You don´t need to draw a massive amount of significant technical details.
So keep it simple, especially in the beginning.

As for the vanishing points, they´re still the same as in the original landscape.

So you can see that the key to creating astounding scenery and varying the size of a landscape illustration is nothing more than a combination of good placement of its landscape features in relation to pre-defined vanishing points for each object pointing from the horizon line and the size you choose for each object; when you place it in order: background-middle ground-foreground.

It seems complicated, but with practice and time, you´ll become like me, and you won´t need even to draw any grid lines the same way I don´t do it anymore.

Every time I look at a landscape now, or I have one in my imagination, my mind creates all those grids, and I don´t need to draw them to build my scenery. I just place the elements.

And so can you. At first, you´ll need to plan the grids visually, but then it will become second nature just to imagine them.

Remember I told you that the size of an element or scenery feature you draw at the horizon line determines the scale of any landscape?
Take a look at what happened when I removed the original little house from the horizon, took off a bunch of trees, and the two additional houses of the background plane.

Suddenly, the space in my landscape became huge! Now, the picture creates the illusion that a vast distance exists between the original houses and the horizon line.

And I didn´t even change where the horizon line is. It´s still in the same place as it is in the original scenery of the above picture!

I´ve also added the shape of a mountain and an ocean to create that sense of distance. By the way, the ocean has that little curve right up top near the mountain’s base, which also adds to the scale of the pic.