If you want to create a remarkable 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 will 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 farmhouse.
Essentially, you have to choose your view and be the eyes of the person who 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 as you see in the pic below.

You might decide you´re actually looking down at your landscape, and so the lower you look, 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 totally and create a pic where people are really, really looking down, but I wouldn´t advise it if you´re just beginning.

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

Got it?
Keep on reading.

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.

One of my first landscapes which I did when I was 17 years old trying to find my path as an illustrator.

The problem starts when you get too close to the house’s facade. As you get near the house, you see that the lines of its shape change in your eyes, the details increase, and you get more choices of where to look.

You notice that not only can you look at the house straightforwardly, 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 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 behind the house into an unseen vanishing point, enabling you to look under that roof in this example — the same 3D effect on the window.

You cannot escape it. You´ll find perspective staring back at you no matter where you look. The big difference between people who know how to render that on 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 more significant 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 more prominent as you get closer, but its facade generally still has the same shape, you saw in the distance, only bigger. And generally, the horizon line gets lower.

Want to know how to draw landscapes or background scenery?
Are you 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 adding a background is one of the things where people have the most difficulty when rendering a drawing.
Particularly 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 in those galleries. Still, most of the time, people stick to drawing characters only. We rarely see an amateur illustration with an incredible 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.