How to Draw A Landscape with Colored Pencils: Realistic Drawings

1. Introduction: Drawing a landscape with color pencils can seem like a very big and overwhelming task. If you can get the hang of it, you can make some absolutely stunning drawings. I want to show you today that actually, if you follow the same process as you usually would for color pencils and break it down into some smaller sections, it's not as difficult as you might expect. My name's Jemma Chambers and I've been making art tutorials since 2020. I've helped tens of thousands of people on my Youtube channel improve their art skills. And today I want to specifically cover how to draw landscapes. I'll show you all of the materials that you'll need, as well as some of the really basic techniques. Then we can start working our way through the process. Selecting a reference photo, drawing out the sketch, and then building up all of the color. And I'll be showing you with this tree landscape. Let's get started. 2. Class Project - Drawing the Landscape: The class project will be to draw this tree landscape. Now I've selected this specific drawing because it's quite complicated, but not too complicated. It's got a really lovely focal point of the tree, but the rest of the landscape I think isn't too tricky. So it's a really great one, if you're new to drawing landscapes. Now I will show you everything that you need to draw this, including how to build up the sketch. But if you want to use my sketch, it is available in the class resources. There are also details of all of the colors I'll be using in this drawing. When you've finished your drawing, please do upload it to the class projects. I would love to see what you've done. All right, let's talk about the materials that you'll need. 3. Materials Needed for Drawing with Colored Pencils: Let's think about the materials that you'll need and the first, most obvious thing you'll need is a set of pencils. Now for this drawing, I'm using the set of 72 prisma color pencils. You don't need to use exactly the same pencils as I am. You can always just find a close match for the colors. Now you may think that you need to spend an absolute fortune on color pencils, getting some professional colored pencils. And although I do love my professional colored pencils, I don't think that they're as important as the paper. You can make some beautiful drawings with something like Reyola as long as you have the right paper. So for all of my drawings, I draw on something called Bristol Board. This is a nice thick paper which allows you to build up all of the colored pencils. Drawing on something like printer paper or sketch paper. You're not going to be able to build up the pencil in the same way. So the Bristol Board allows me to build up that pencil, but it's also nice and smooth, so it gives me a lot of control over where that pencil is going. Next up, you will need a way of sharpening your pencils. Now, I have this hand cranked pencil sharpener. I specifically like it because I can change the blades when they get blunt, but you don't need something this fancy. A basic pencil sharpener will be fine as long as you can get a really nice and sharp point. Next up, I use some washy tape just so that I can create a really nice clear outline. Again, this is an optional extra you could just draw right up to the edge of the paper. I think it looks nice having a white border. To create your sketch, you'll need a ruler, a graphite pencil, and an erasor. And then the next thing you'll need is something you'll need to make. This is a set of swatches. I like to see exactly what each pencil looks like on the paper rather than relying on the lead or the barrel of the pencil, which doesn't tend to be that accurate. If I draw all of the colors out, I can really clearly see what I'm working with specifically on the paper I'm going to draw on. What I do is I go from as light as each pencil can go to as dark as each pencil can go, and then I label it. I do this, generally speaking, in kind of rainbow order. Now the final thing you'll need is some way of looking at the reference photo. So I like looking at the reference photo on my ipad. I specifically like that I can zoom in if I want to see something with a bit more detail. That said, if you don't have an ipad, you can of course, print the reference photo out. So you will need some pencils, the right kind of paper, a pencil sharpener, a ruler pencil and erasor, a set of swatches and some way of looking at the reference photo. Let's think about some of the key techniques that you'll need to draw. 4. The Basic Techniques for Drawing witth Colored Pencils: Let's cover some of the fundamental techniques that you need to know to draw with colored pencils. And first up, all colored pencils are built up through a process called layering. This is where you build up the pencil in a series of light layers. You don't want to just go in really hard with the pencil. What this allows is essentially for the pencils to mix together. Generally speaking, because we're drawing realistic items, you want to be making a series of gradients. It doesn't tend to go from one color very harshly to another. So we can mix these colors together. We build up a lot of the pencil bit by bit. Gradually we can make all of these gradients and all of these different colors which will build up the picture you see a bit better. What I mean, when we're drawing the landscape. So in order to build up those light layers, there's a few things that will help. Firstly, if you hold the pencil further back than you might think, it will stop you from being able to press too hard. So if you hold the pencil back here, it will stop you from needing to have as much pencil control. You also want to make sure that you've got a really nice and sharp pencil. The pencil will go down in a much smoother and more consistent way if it's sharp. So do make sure that you are frequently sharpening. Next up a lot of the layers, we want to put down the pencil in as smooth a way as possible. So I like to work in circular motions rather than just scribbling back and forth with the pencil. If you work in circles again, it goes down in a much smoother way, which is going to be so important for drawing this landscape. Now these are the main things that you'll need to know to draw a landscape. Let's start working through the process I always do and that I would use for any landscape. 5. Studying the Reference Photo: The first thing I always do is select a reference photo. Because I draw, realistically, I find the easiest way to do that is from a reference. Now, I've selected this reference photo for a few reasons. Firstly, it's got some really good contrast. It is absolutely the most important thing when selecting a reference is to make sure it's got good contrast. A picture like this is always going to look better than a picture like this. This reference has some great light areas and some great darks. It's also nice and clear so I can see what I'm doing. Now, before I start drawing, I always like to take a minute to look at the reference and really see what's here. It's kind of part of me getting my bearings. And let's start off by having a little bit of a look at the sky. So the sky is quite generally dark and it's got quite a lot of clouds in it. Now, the overall color, I would say is cool gray. And there's some very light areas, some more mid tone. And then there are some very dark areas. On the most part, I would say it's generally kind of out of focus and patchy. But there are some more in focus clouds where you can see a lot of detail. It's really only this cloud here and this cloud here. So I'm going to want to start off by drawing in the main shapes, but then we can start thinking about adding in all of these little details. The other detailed area in the sky are these little beds which are add in right at the very end. We don't want to add those in before we've done all of our blending and everything is how we want it to. At the end, in terms of the grass along here, there are some very light, almost yellowy green areas like here. There's again, more midtone areas and then it's very dark along here on the right hand side and generally down the bottom down here. Now I am noticing that there's quite a clear shadow from the tree and it maybe has a little hint of brown to it. So it's not only green that we're going to want to add here. And there is a little bit of texture along the bottom, but I wonder if maybe I don't think I'm going to draw in the texture. I think it wouldn't be possible to see it when the drawings finished and it's not hugely textured. Let's look at the tree. So the tree is sort of sorted into sections. You can see that there is a section around here, there's a section here, then quite a large section along here and a section here. And that's essentially how I'm going to want to approach drawing this. There's obviously a lot of texture here that we will want to draw in, but I'm particularly noticing that there's a dark part here, for example, midtone, and then lighter along the top. And if I can start off by mapping in those key shapes and colors, then adding the texture over the top, I think will be a lot easier. All right, so those are the main things that I'm noticing. To start with, let's start drawing. 6. Sketching the Outlines: Now that we've looked at the reference photo, we need to make our sketch. And I like to do this with something called the grid method. This is where you have a grid on your reference photo and you put a grid on your drawing paper. Then all I need to do is draw what's in each individual square. Now I have put this reference photo with the grid in the class resources. I now need to work out how many squares I want to put on my drawing paper. So I'm going to draw four centimeter squares on my paper. You don't necessarily need to make squares that are the same size as this. I find because this is a reasonably simple sketch, I can make some pretty large squares. Now I'm pressing quite firmly with the pencil here, my lines very, very dark. In actuality, you want to be pressing much, much lighter than this. I just want to make it really clear that you can see on the camera. But when I'm doing this on an actual drawing, I want to be as light as possible, so I'll be able to erase the grid easily a little bit later. So from here, all I want to do is work one square at a time, really looking at what's in each individual square. Now, because most of the sketch we need to make is made up of clouds, I'm not going to draw all of the intricate shapes. I want to draw a more general shape. So I'm starting off on this square at the top, and all I really want to draw is a line going down here. I want to look at where this line is crossing the line of the grid. So here, this is about halfway along, I would say. And this is about, maybe, a little bit less than halfway up. And that's all I'm going to do is draw a line from halfway along to halfway up. I can then start looking at the next square. All I need to do is draw a very small, kind of curved shape around here. There's not a huge amount to see in this square and draw that shape here. And I'm pretty much just going to work around one square at a time. So as I say, most of this is made up of a series of clouds and I'm doing some very rough sketches. Most of the mapping out of the shapes we're actually going to do with the colored pencils. Probably the most in depth area that I need to sketch out is here with these hills. It's again, still very, very simple. I can make sure that I'm in the right square by counting that I want to be four squares down and on the edge square. And then the horizon line is just a little bit above this line of the grid, But it's still pretty level, I would say, to this grid line. And I can draw that line along here on this square. It's got this hill coming up that's going up to maybe a third of the way up and ends level with this hill. Sketch that in and just work my way along getting these really rough shapes in. You'll see it's really not a very detailed sketch. We don't need to get it absolutely perfect, I just want to get the key shapes. Now, the area with the most detail is definitely the tree. And I do want to try and get this as accurate as possible. Now if, for example, you wanted to have large squares on most of the sketch, but you wanted to have a little bit more detail on the tree. You could draw smaller grid lines in just this section, so you had a little bit more help when drawing the tree. So once I'm happy that I've drawn in the whole of the sketch outlines and I have something that I can work from. I now want to do is erase all of the grid lines. So I'm just using a Putty Errasor here to erase the lines. You can use whatever razor you have to hand. And again, if you had created some much lighter lines, this would be much easier. You want to, at the end, not be able to see that the grid lines were here. And in fact, once you've erased all of the grid lines, what I often do is just go over the sketch itself as well, so that it's much lighter lines. I don't want to have a really dark sketch. I want it to be as light as possible so it doesn't show through the colored pencils at the end. So now we've created our sketch, We can start building the colored pencils on here. 7. Base Layers in the Sky: So now that we've got a reference photo, we've drawn out our sketch, let's start building up the landscape Now, this first chapter is quite long, but I think it's reasonably simple. So I want to start here by putting down some base layers on the whole of the sky. And as I say, it is going to be time consuming. Now, the first thing I want to do here is be looking for the lightest color that I can see within the sky. So the lightest color is probably around here. And the closest color I have to this in my set is the 20% cool gray. And you can see that color in a number of places on the sky. Any area that's quite light, I would say that that is the closest. So I simply want to start off by putting a smooth and even layer of this pencil over the whole of the sky area. Now there are a few important things here to be thinking about and it is very similar to the usual. First up, notice how far back I'm holding the pencil. So the key here is that I want to be pressing as lightly as possible, and that's going to be a lot easier if I hold the pencil back here. I'm going to need to have a lot less pencil control. This pencil isn't particularly short, but you'll notice that I am using a pencil extender, I think just makes the whole process much easier on my hand. So along here I want to be looking at where my sketches, just drawing a nice clear line between where the sky will be and the grass will be and then I can carry on working my way from there. So beyond holding the pencil further back, the next really important thing is that I want to be working in circular motions. So because the sky generally is quite smooth and certainly whilst I'm blocking in these key shapes, I want to make it as smooth as possible. The pencil will go down in a much more consistent way if I work in large circle or oval motions. So you can see I'm working in quite big ovals and I am still kind of working in blocks. I find it easier to work in kind of strips going down, I guess. Now the next thing that's really, really important is you want to be making sure that you have a nice and sharp pencil. Now, this is even more important, or needs doing it even more often with prisma color. So I am taking my pencil away a lot to sharpen it. And you can see already it's getting to the point that it's a bit blunt. And when it does get blunt, I find it goes down in a much less consistent way. So every time I take my pencil away, generally speaking, I'm doing that to sharpen it. And I think I probably sharpened my pencil when just doing this light base layer. I probably sharpen the pencil about six times. That's something to bear in mind now as I work my way from the left to the right, which is generally speaking, how I work, as I get towards the tree, there is something that I want to be bearing in mind here. Because the tree doesn't have a really sharp, crisp edge around the outside of it. I do need to put some of this light gray slightly over where the leaves are going to go. So because you can see some of the gray through here and through here through here, I just want to go a little bit into the tree so that I'm able to keep that background as I'm working on the tree a little bit later. I also don't want to forget to add in this teeny tiny little sort of triangular shape. And then beyond that, I can generally work around the tree trunk. So you'll see here I'm just working my way around the tree and then I'll continue blocking in the rest of the sky in a second. Do you notice that I'm holding the pencil a little bit closer to the tip? At this point, I'm still not holding it right up to the tip, but because I am now needing to be a little bit more accurate about where the pencil's going in relation to the tree, I do just need to have that little bit more control here. And this is all there is to it for the first step. So as I say, this is quite time consuming. Just this section up until now has taken over 15 minutes. You don't want to rush it. If you want to get the pencil down in a really smooth way, and because we're blocking in such a large area, please do take your time. If you rush, it'll end up just looking a little bit scribbly. So once I filled in the whole of this top section, what I want to do is gradually move from this lighter color towards the darker colors. And I'm literally going to focus in this chapter at moving through the grays so I can move on to the 50% cool gray now. So what I want to do with this pencil is mark in all of the main shapes of the clouds. I don't need to necessarily get this perfect and I don't need to get every detail in. But I do want to map out a bit clearer what we've got here. Now, this is made a bit easier because I can still see my sketch. It is very, very light and you probably struggled to see it on camera. I can still see the sketch, and I can use that as a guide to help me work out where this pencil is going to go. So this is roughly the edge of the cloud that I want to draw in this section. So I want to be following this edge line all along here. Beyond this, I want to be marking in any really clear major shapes. So I'm particularly thinking about this line here, this kind of triangular patch, this circular or semi circular curve here, and maybe around here as well as well as these fluffy parts here. Now you'll see that it's not super clear, but I am just trying to get this mapped in roughly now. The most important thing still is to be still using little circular motion. So you can see I'm making much smaller circles now 'cause I'm working in a smaller area. But I'm still holding the pencil further back because I still want to make sure that I'm pressing really lightly. We will build up a lot of vibrant color a little bit later, but I don't need to worry about that right now. Now as I mentioned in this chapter, I'm going to focus really on just using these cool grays. I'm not going to worry about any other colors now. In actuality, I would say that the background, the sky here is quite more blue colored. It certainly has a good amount of blue to it, but that's something that I want to be adding in a little bit later. I literally want to focus at this point in mapping in the shapes and then everything else we can focus on in the next chapter. So this area here, let's take a look at what I'm drawing there. Is this not particularly dark, more like a light midtone patch here. It's not the lightest area like around here, but it is a little bit darker. So I want to add a little bit of shading here before I move on to the more prominent darker areas like here and here. So you can just see me adding some really light shading. And then let's move on to this very big dark cloud here. Now in actuality, this cloud is very, very dark. Much darker than the 50% cool gray. So although I, in this section have focused on getting the outline right, trying to get the general sort of mid tone shape of this area correct. I'm not adding all of the detail into the middle because there wouldn't really be any point. By the time that I added the darker color, I would be covering it all back over, Judge. So let's just block in this area, the left along here. I'm still trying to make it as smooth as possible. It looks a little bit scratchy around this area, but don't worry about that. The more colors that we add over the top, the less scratchy it'll look. And then actually I'm going to go back and add a little bit more shading to this area here before I can start moving onto the clouds a little bit lower down. So again, I want to be looking at the shapes that I can see in this section, in this cloud. And it's almost split into three sections. So there's this top section all around here and then it's got these, they called like arch shapes here. Then there's this middle cloud section where there is the odd light patch I'm going to want to maybe mark in and the sort of zig zag. And then there's this other little section of cloud at the bottom. And then there's quite a crisp line along here. So I'm going to try and mark all of that in again. It doesn't need to be perfect. And we will be adding to this a lot as we work through the darker colors and even onto the next chapter. But you can see, I'm just trying to get it roughly right. So from here I can work along just above the grass. And there's a whole sort of mid to dark area all along here. So all along here it needs to be at a minimum, midtone, this color. But there are some areas like around here where it gets really quite dark and it all looks a little bit peculiar. It doesn't look like clouds, but that's okay. We are literally, at this point, focusing on drawing the shapes, and I think it gets easier as you work towards the darker pencils, partly because there's less shading that you need to do. The darker the pencil, the less we have to put down, whereas the lightest pencil, it needs to go over the whole area. And then let's just have a look at the shapes over on this right hand side as well. So there's this shape of this cloud here. And then there's also this section here that's just coming down. And this whole area is a kind of mid tone, I would say. But I am just marking in this shape because it's reasonably I want to make sure that I get it in the right place. You can see I've marked it in very lightly, but I will add to that with a darker pencil as we go. So now let's move on to the next darkest pencil. So this is the 70% cool gray. And I'm only wanting to put this now on the darker areas, not the darkest areas, because we will do one pencil that's darker. But with this pencil, I want to look at more of the mid to darker tones and I can start getting in a little bit more of the main shapes. So as I mentioned up here, it's this triangular shape, for example. I can mark this in a bit clearer, maybe make the edge round here a little bit clearer. And just generally go over all of these areas that need to be a bit darker. No, I'm not going to go through this in too much detail because honestly, it is just a case of working our way from those lighter pencils towards the darker pencils and trying to fill in the main shapes that are in each area. But I don't need to get it perfect. And I'm very much looking at the same thing each time. So for example, on this area down the bottom, it's generally a little bit kind of patchy. I guess you can see that there's some darker areas going along here, there's a line here, then there's some lighter areas that I'm going to want to avoid. But as I say, it doesn't need to be perfect as long as we've got the general shape and the general kind of patchiness of the clouds, That's what I'm trying to do here. So it's generally the same thing that we've been doing before until I get to this big cloud along the top where I am still doing the same thing as before. But I'm just needing to mark in the shapes kind of for the first time. So up here, the dark areas darkest in the corner to the right. And then there's these kind of sections that are coming down. So there's a part coming along here and then around in here and around and in here and around and in here. And it's kind of got this zigzag in out pattern along here. It's very light here and then it's kind of mid tone to light here. So I want to be trying to get the idea of those shapes and then I can just block in this top right hand corner up here. And then I think quite quickly, it's starting to look a bit kind of moody, like the moody sky I think of it. I can go over these shapes here and then at this point, I'm generally happy with how the clouds are looking. But I do want to move onto a pencil that's a little bit darker. So actually the only pencil that I would say is darker than the 70% gray, it's probably the black pencil. The dark umber is quite a dark pencil, but it's more of a brown and I don't think it's quite appropriate for this sky. So I can now move on to the black pencil, and I'm only putting this in the darkest places, so particularly in the top left corner. And maybe adding a little bit of shading along here as well as in this section here. And then I'm going to need to put a lot of the pencil in the top right as well. Now I can't stress enough that I still want to be working lightly. This is still the base layers. We're still mapping out the main shapes. There is a lot of color that we're going to want to add over the top here. And we want to make sure that we are able to do that, which we can do by pressing lightly. Now, as always, make sure that you are frequently sharpening your pencil here. You'll get a much smoother, more consistent color if you do. And that is really it for this first chapter. So I now feel like I've got the main shapes of the sky marked out. As I say, a lot of tweaking of the colors will need to happen, but I certainly feel for now that I've got my bearings and we can start building some color on top of this. Al right, that is it for this first chapter. 8. Brighten up the Sky: Now in this chapter, I want to brighten everything up and really add a little bit of color. Right now, as I mentioned, we've only got a series of grays and black. And I can see a lot more blue in here. So first up, I'm going to look for the most obvious color that I think is missing. And I'm particularly looking at the lighter areas. So this area around here, it looks to me a little bit bluer than the 20% cool gray. I want to make sure that I keep a really nice and light color, so I'm going to use the cloud blue. This is just a really nice soft kind of powdery blue. And I'm going to very lightly put this over the top of the cool gray that's already here. You'll notice that this isn't making a huge change, but it is slightly adjusting the color that's here and just adding a little hint of blue. Now, I'm only putting this on the absolute lightest areas. I'm not going to worry about putting it in any of the darker areas. But to put this down, I am working in the same way. I am still pressing lightly. Maybe more like a light to medium pressure, just to try and build up a bit of this color. But I do want to make sure that I have a nice and sharp pencil. So next up, I want to think about the next most obvious color that's missing. And I still feel like we need to be adding quite a lot of blue to the clouds, so I'm using here jade green. I actually think jade green is more like a blue. I'm going to pretty much put this over all of the darker areas just to try and get the base a little bit more blue toned. I am going to add some more blue to this in a second, but right now, I just want to make that kind of underlying color a little bit bluer. So I can use it on all of the areas of gray, particularly where the gray is meeting the lighter area, particularly like this strip along the bottom. It's nice to get that smoothed out a little bit. I think it makes the transition a little bit better, so I'm putting it all over this area here, for example. That part that's a little bit darker than the rest of the drawing, but it's not hugely dark mid tone area. And I also want to put it all over. I'm going to focus more on the edges, the mid tone areas around here. I'm not going to worry about that black area, a little bit more towards the corner. And I'm once again doing this in the same way, we're just adding another layer on the top to try and adjust the color. So I still want to be working with that medium to light pressure now, but in circular motions, they still want this to be as smooth as possible. And as I said, I just want to slightly adjust the color that's here. Now. I think that that looks a bit better, but I still don't think there's enough blue when I look at all of these clouds. It just has a real blue tone to it. Particularly around the darker gray and the darker sort of black areas. All of this just looks like it has a hint of blue, almost like a kind of greenish blue. So I want to be looking for the closest color in my set to that color. And actually, I don't think I've got something that I feel is an extremely close match, but I'm going to use the color called peacock blue. It's a kind of, I don't know, I feel like it's a kind of greenish, bluey gray. It is certainly more on the blue side though. And I think not only can I use this to add a little hint of blue to the clouds, I don't want to be adding huge amounts, but I do want to be building a light layer over almost all of the clouds, but also in some of the darker areas, it's going to give them a lot more of a pop if the black has some blue behind it. I always find if you want black to have a certain richness to it, adding a little layer of blue in there does help. So you can see here, I am just lightly going over all of the clouds. I am using this to kind of fill in some of the key shapes, but it's very similar to what we were doing in the last chapter. I'm just trying to use the blue to fill in the lights and darks. I'm really just looking at the clouds as a series of shapes. And if I look at them like they are just light tone, mid tone, dark tone. And try and use my blue to help it match that. I think that's the easiest way to do this. So moving along to the bottom, and again, I'm just going to add that blue over the whole of this black area. And then I'm also going to lightly add it over all of the gray. So as I say, I'm just wanting to turn that gray into more like a bluey gray. Now, I think it looks quite extreme at this point, but that is because we need to add some gray back over the top of this once we go back down through the colors. So starting with the black and working our way back down through those grays. Putting the gray over at the top of the blue, you will still see the blue. But it won't be as kind of overpowering as I think it is at the moment. So I'm going to carry on. On this area on the right, you'll notice that I do generally work from left to right. I do like to be quite methodical and I am skipping through this quite fast now. Mostly because it is just a case of doing the same thing again and again. And it, as I've said before, is quite time consuming because it's a large area that we're needing to color. But it is just following the same steps as we have before. So now I'm generally happy with the blue tone on the drawing. What I'm going to do is start with the black pencil and gradually work my way back down through the grays. So we're doing the same as we did before in the first chapter, but kind of in reverse. So I'm starting off by going over the darkest areas again with the black. And I'm just bit by bit using circular motions to gradually fill up and fill in the black area. And what I want to do is put the black in the absolute darkest areas, so that's generally around the corners. I also want to fade out into the gray areas. And then I will add some extra shading with gray to kind of make a nice gradient around the sky here. The important thing to remember is that we are basically just making a series of gradients from the very dark areas that I'm shading in now into the much lighter areas. There's not, generally speaking in the sky any particularly harsh lines that generally smooths nicely from one color to another. So you can see I'm filling in around the edge around here and then gradually fading that where I'll pick that up with the darker gray in a second. And once I worked my way along the top, I can go down the side here as I say, it is the same areas that we added the black in before. So I also want to be filling in this area down the bottom as well, just really getting that nice and deep color. So once I'm happy with the black, I'm going to move my way down through the colors. So from here I want to move onto the 70% cool gray. And I want to use this partly to sort of blend from the black into the lighter areas. So you can see me doing that here. And as I get to the black, I am pressing harder so that it kind of smooths it all together. I can also use this pencil to add in some details and generally go back over all of those shapes that we filled in before. Now as I said before, I don't need this to be absolutely perfect, particularly because it is a cloud. And clouds, generally speaking, aren't perfect shape. They're random shapes. I am trying to get it as close as possible so you can see that, that cloud up the top is looking reasonably close to the reference photo. In terms of the shapes and the shading, there are some areas that need to be made a bit darker, but we can do that the next gray. And then down here, I want to be blending the black area nice and smoothly into the surrounding areas. So I'm going to go over all of these midtone and darker areas. There's not a huge amount that I need to add into this middle section here. The area that I need to add the most into is the top right. And I am really taking my time here, I want to really look at the reference photo. Look at the shapes that are around this section, so all of those areas where the dark is kind of sticking out to the left. All of these shapes that are going along here. I want to be really looking at these one by one and gradually building up the color. Now for most of these areas, I think it looks much, much better. It's looking closer to the reference. I think maybe at the very end, I might need to go back over this with the black. Because although the gray is blending the black areas with the darker areas very, very nicely, I think it is toning down the black maybe a little bit too much, but I'm not going to worry about adjusting that black at this point. That's something I can do when I've drawn in all of the grass and the tree. So again, I want to carry on working my way down through the gray. So this is the 50% gray nail. Just filling in all of those midtone areas. So just going back over the same grays, trying along the bottom to blend the gray up into the lighter area above. And here I'm really smoothing everything out. Now it's worth remembering that the 50% cool gray isn't the lightest gray that we'll be using here. There will be another lighter color in a little while, but actually I'm not going to do the lightest color in this chapter, I think before doing anything final, like adding in that last color or adding in some of the black areas. Going back over that, I think before I do that, I want to draw in all of the green sections. It's going to make it a lot easier to see what needs to go where, but for now, I'm just going to use this pencil to smooth out some of these last areas. As I say, it doesn't matter that it looks a little bit, it's not looking quite as black, quite as dark as it potentially could and should, But that's okay. We can adjust that a bit later, and it doesn't matter that it looks a little bit scratchy again. We can come back to that and adjust that a little bit later as well. So by the end of this chapter, you should have something filled in for the whole of the sky. 9. Mark In the Grass: In this chapter, I want to focus on marking in the tree as well as all of the grass down the bottom. And then I also really want to get that grass to its full vibrancy. So I'm going to start in the way that I always do. I want to start with the lightest color, gradually work my way down to the darkest color, and then back to the lightest color. And I'm starting here on the grass. I want to be looking for the lightest color that I can see within the grass. So I would say the lightest color is this kind of green here. So I want to be looking for the closest color in my swatches to this color. So I've picked a kind of yellowy green. And I want to be putting this down in the way that I always do with my lightest color. So you'll notice that I'm holding the pencil quite far back. I'm not holding it really close to the tip so that I can press nice and lightly. And I'm also generally working in circular motions rather than just going back and forth with the pencil. That said, I am going in a kind of back and forth motion whilst going along the edge of the grass at the top up here. Now before I move on to blocking in the rest of the grass, I also want to be putting some green on the lighter areas of the tree. Now the tree is kind of organized into sections. For example, there's a section here, this looks kind of like a clump. There's a section here, a section around the back here, and a section here. And I want to be marking out these sections. Now I'm noticing that it's much lighter at the top generally of each of these sections. So lighter up here, lighter up here, lighter along here. So I'm going to use this light green pencil to just start marking in where the lighter areas of these sections are and just begin to get my bearings here. So as I said, I'm generally going along the top of each of these sections and you can see here that I'm working in those circular motions to try and get this down as evenly as possible. Although the tree does have a lot of texture to it right now, I'm not going to worry about that. I just want to get the key colors, the key shapes mapped in. And then I can build up on that a little bit later. Now that I'm happy with the general lighter areas on the tree, I can move on to blocking in the lightest areas on the rest of the grass. So now note that I'm not just putting this color over the whole area. I'm generally putting this lighter green on the lighter areas. And then I'll put a darker base layer on the darker areas. So it's generally lighter along the top here and lighter along the top here. Whereas it's much darker down here. And also it's darker along here. So let's just focus on putting the pencil down in those sort of lighter strips, those areas of lighter strips. I'm happy with these lighter areas. I want to gradually work my way down to the darker colors. Now, the next darkest color I can see within the grass is the olive green. It's a kind of quite dark yellowish green. And I want to use that to continue building up the base layers. So I'm using this color to start off on the tree. I want to be putting this over all of the midtone areas. So let's just take a minute to look at the tree again. And I think it's going to be easiest if we look at the darkest areas, then we've looked at the lightest and darkest and we want to be putting this color in the middle. So the darkest areas are generally along here. There's a dark line along here, and there's a dark line along here, as well as down the bottom here and here. So I'm basically putting this along the line of where those darker colors are. And then I'm gradually using circular motions and kind of fading it up into the lighter green section. Now as I say, we will be putting a lot of texture over the top of this in the next chapter, but right now I just want to focus on getting some sort of color down on the tree area. And then we'll be able to fill up those darkest areas in a second with a darker pencil. So once I'm generally happy with the tree, I can move on to putting this color on the rest of the grass. Now, I also want to use this to map in some of the main shapes. For example, along here there are a few lines. There's a line going up here particularly. And the line going along here separating kind of this hill from this hill. So I can use this pencil to very carefully just map in those lines. I can still see my sketch underneath, so that is making this a bit easier. I can go over the lines of the sketch and then once I've done that, I can just block in pretty much everywhere else that is white, just plain paper except for the tree trunk. We'll come back to the tree trunk in a second. Now, as I always say, this is ten times easier. If you have a nice and sharp pencil, I do find the pencil goes down in a much more consistent way with a sharp pencil. And in fact, for marking in those more detailed sections a second ago, that is again, much easier with a sharp pencil just because you have a lot more control about where it's going. Now you'll notice that I have left that area in the top right, there's a little patch of white. That's just, I've realized that that needs to be a lighter green. So we'll come back to that in a second. But I really just want to be building up this color, nice and lightly blocking this in. Now, it is quite time consuming as with a lot of, because drawing a landscape is just a lot of color pencils, but it is very much the same as what we would usually do working in circular motions, Pressing very lightly, and making sure that we have a nice and sharp pencil. I've generally blocked in the whole area and I've got the green everywhere. I'm just going to slightly fade this color a bit better into the lighter green above. It's looking a little bit too harsh at this point. And then let's put something down on the tree trunk. So this is a particularly dark brown pencil. It's my darkest brown that I have in the set is the dark umber. And I'm very, very carefully using this to mark out what I can see of the tree trunk. Now I think it's particularly important to note that it's not all one solid shape. It goes sort of curves in a little bit here and then goes round. There's a patch of sky that we did draw in I think the first chapter. And the branch is going around here and up here. And then this branch is going up, this one, going this way, and it kind of goes in and out here. Now, I don't necessarily need to get that all absolutely perfect. I am trying to follow those key shapes as well as following what I've got here from my sketch. But we are going to tweak this a lot more in the next chapter. For now, I just want to very, very lightly get something down with this brown pencil. So once I'm happy with the trunk, I'm going to also use this pencil to mark in those darkest areas that I mentioned a second ago. Just try and get them blocked in, in the rough right place. And this will give us something, as I say, to build upon in the next chapter. Right now, I'm pretty happy with how the tree is looking at this point and I think this is enough for me to really start focusing on more of the grass section now. So let's carry on using this same pencil, and I want to be putting this over the top of the green. We've already get down, but only in the absolute darkest places. So although it looks a little bit peculiar right now that I'm putting brown over the top of green. Once there's more green over the top of this, it will make a lot more sense and it'll look much, much more realistic. Now, there's not a huge amount of places that I actually need to put this brown for now. I want to be focusing on the shadow of the tree. So you can see that there's this very prominent and blurry shape from the tree here. It's also very dark along here where this hills meeting this hill and also all along the bottom. So right now I don't need to worry too much about layers of detail, I just want to be getting these lights and darks in roughly the right place. And it doesn't matter that it looks a little bit kind of washed out. It's not looking very accurate. You see, I'm just slightly adjusting the line along between the two hills. Then I can start blocking in and filling in this section all along the bottom. Now I do want this to fade quite nicely up into the lighter green. So I'm going to try and do that. You see, I'm not adding a huge amount at this point, but I do want to get a good idea that this brown or this darker area needs to be along the bottom. So long as I'm generally happy along here, I want to carry on working my way towards the darker pencils. Let's just really quickly fill in this area here with that light green from the beginning, and then I'm going to move on to the black pencil. So this is the only pencil in my set, I would say that is darker than the dark umber. So although I think that the black looks a little bit harsh at this point. That's okay. In a second, we'll do a few things to kind of tone it down. I want to be using this black to go over the darkest areas. And as I say, I am just focusing on the hills now, so I can go over that top hill as well as the shadow here. And then I'm also going to add black all along this bottom section. So all along the very bottom of the picture. And actually I'm going to do this a few times, so I want to be gradually building up the black, gradually building up that really dark color. So I can do it once and try and fade it into the green section above here, and that looks a lot more natural. Once I've done that, I'm working from the right to the left. Today, I'm actually going to do it again with a nice and sharp pencil, still working from the right to the left. You can see I am pressing a little bit firmer now. I don't need to be building up loads of color along here because I know that I want it to be particularly dark. You can see I am far from pressing full force. It is much, much easier. With a sharper pencil, I am using a kind of medium pressure and just keeping going over this section along the bottom and you can see that that's looking much better, It's getting a lot more contrast. So let's go over it one more time. And I'm really pressing quite firmly now and I'm going right along the bottom of the drawing. So really trying to fill in the tooth of the paper, all of those little white spots now. But just in that bottom section then, I want it to kind of fade as I work my way up. Very much the same as I always do. I'm now using a reasonably firm pressure, still trying to use those circular motions, and making sure I got a really sharp pencil. And that's really all there is to this section, so I am going to add some extra black to this area on the right. I want it to be a little bit darker. I'm, again, not being harsh with my pencil here. I don't want to be pressing hard in this section because it is much lighter than the really dark area at the bottom. And I'm also going to see any other areas, I want to add a little bit of black. So I just want to define this. Corner, this bend as well as here as well, this line between the two hills is generally quite dark. So I just want to build upon that. And then what I'm going to do from here is I'm going to work my way from this darkest color, gradually back through those same colors that I've already been using, towards the lighter colors. And again, I'm going to go through this reasonably quickly because it is just the case of doing the same as what we've done before. So here I'm using the dark umber again and I'm very firmly going over all of the black area and then fading out. As I get a little bit higher, I can go over the black on the right hand side that we just added in tone down that black, I think putting brown and then in a little while green over the top of this just really tones down and removes all of that kind of harshness that you get when you put black in a drawing. I need the darkness of the black because it is generally quite a dark photo in a number of places. So I'm going to work my way the whole way along the bottom. And there are a few things that I'm doing, maybe slightly differently, particularly, you'll see here I'm putting quite a prominent line, so there are some quite harsh lines running through here. There's a line going along here, all the way along to here. There's a quite sharp line going along here as well. All up here, there's a line here. And there's also a line here going around and over the hill as well as here. So I want to start adding in some of these lines. I don't need to necessarily get them exactly the same as what is on here, but I do just want to add that, a little bit of extra structure. I think that's what's creating the nice curved looking hills. So I'm putting the most prominent line with the brown pencil here, really marking in where I'm going to want that to be. And then I can be quite firm with my shading underneath that line, but then above it I can fade it out a little bit so that it's not white as harsh. And also add some of the other sharper lines above, so you can just see me going lightly back and forth with my pencil and just adding in some of those more prominent lines up here. Now I'm generally happy with down the bottom. Let's do the same here. Going over that black with quite firm pressure, but blending the brown out into the area above it. I'm also going to go quite firmly over the shadow of the tree and I also want to put quite a detailed line where the hill is meeting the sky. You'll notice that there is quite a crisp and dark line, particularly on this right hand side of the tree. So let's get that marked in before carrying on building up some more of this brown in the other darker areas. And once I'm happy with the brown, I can then move back to the olive green. And actually I'm going to need to use a lot of this pencil. So I want to very firmly go over any area that's a bit darker, any area that I put the brown, but also I'm looking for in the lighter areas, any areas that look too light, where I can put a little light covering of this pencil so that when I go onto the lightest green in a second, it's not quite as light. You see that? That's blending quite nicely. Now I'm going to move onto the section above, the hill above here. Go over that darker area where we put the brown before adding a little bit of extra shading in some of the lighter areas. So you can see me doing that here. So I've gone over all of the darker areas where we added the brown. And then I'm just going to add a little bit of extra detail. There's a line going along here, so I can lightly add that in with the olive green pencil and just gradually build this green up a little bit more. And then let's do the same down here. Just go along the sharp line here and then fade up. Just try and make it a softer edge. So I think that's looking much better. It's already at the top here, looking much more realistic. Let's carry on adding the olive green lower down. Now I think what I'm particularly liking about these hills is that there's not a huge amount of texture to it, certainly not the kind of texture that I want to build up because it's really small and kind of Bobby grass texture, they don't think you'll really be able to see at the end. So it feels like all it is is a series of gradients which I am quite enjoying doing. I think if you can get some nice smooth transitions from one color to another, that is the key. Now I really want to build up a lot of the green on this left hand side. It's quite dark towards the edge, and then it fades towards the middle. And then from here, I want to think about blending and smoothing out those lightest areas just after building up a little bit more. There's just a few areas where I think it would benefit from a bit more of this green. And then I'm really going to apply some firm pressure with the lightest green. Now I'm going to put this everywhere that's left, but I'm not necessarily going to use firm pressure throughout. There are a few areas that are a little bit lighter. So particularly like along here and maybe along here, if I can use some quite firm pressure on the most part with this pencil, but avoid those lightest areas with the firm pressure, I'm still putting the pencil down on the lighter areas. Then I can go over it and apply the firm pressure with the white pencil, and it will just make it that little bit lighter. So you can see me going over all of these green areas nice and firmly except for here. And then let's go over those with the white pencil, and that's just giving it a final smooth. And then at this point, I would say that I am happy with the grass. So in the next chapter, we can really have a look at adding some detail into the tree, but that is it for this chapter. 10. Add in the Final Details: Now in this final chapter, I want to focus on drawing the tree, really adding in that final bit of detail, as well as any final finishing touches. So I'm going to start off by focusing on this tree. And what I particularly want to do is work through the colors I can see within the tree, adding in the texture. So let's take a minute to have a look at the tree. Now, obviously I'm zoomed in quite closely here, so I can really see what the tree looks like. In actuality, we're not going to need to draw the tree in this amount of detail. I am particularly noticing that it's got a kind of fluffy texture, I guess because of all of the leaves. Also, as I said before, when we were filling in the base layers, it's got a number of different greens. Primarily a lighter green usually around the tops, most of it is darker green. And then there's some areas that are really quite dark. These sort of shadowed areas like a long here, which is very dark brown or black. So what I want to do is start as I usually would from the lightest green, gradually work my way towards the darkest color, and then back to the lightest, and I want to gradually build up that texture. So I'm starting here with the lightest green. As you can see, I am filling in a series of dots. Now, as I said, we don't need to add loads of detail to all of the leaves trying to make it all perfect. Because in actuality, the tree isn't that big in the picture. So adding loads and loads of detail isn't going to be visible at the end. What I'm doing is making small dots with my pencil. I'm trying to be reasonably consistent with them. As in, I'm trying to make the spacing reasonably even and the dot size reasonably even. It's quite easy to end up getting a bit carried away trying to do it faster and making your dots suddenly bigger. So try and focus on not doing that. And I'm just going to go over all of the lightest areas with these dots, beyond trying to be consistent with the arts. I wouldn't say I'm pressing particularly lightly or particularly hard. I'm using kind of a medium pressure. And the other thing that I really want to focus on to try and get this looking as realistic as possible by the end is the edge of the tree. So around the outline of the tree, it's not a perfectly smooth line. There are some leaves that are sticking out like here, like these leaves down the bottom. And it's generally wibbly line all around the edge. Now, I've already blocked in the general shapes and the general kind of patches. I can now focus on when going around the edge, really looking for each of these sections at where the edge of the leaves are actually going. And I don't need to get it perfect. I am trying where possible to make the edge of the leaves look as natural as possible. So for example, on this section I'm drawing right now, along the bottom, it's got a perfectly straight line at the moment from the base layers. That's not looking very realistic at all. That's not how a tree grows. So I want to be adding some of these little circular motions beneath. And obviously, it looks a bit wed right now because this is such a light pencil. But as we work our way towards the darker pencils, it will make more sense. So I'm happy with all of the dots on this first layer. With this first color, I want to move on to the next darkest green. And actually, on the most part, I'm going to work my way through the same colors that I used for the grass along the bottom. Because not only do I generally speaking think it's the same colors, but I think it's going to create a more kind of cohesive drawing at the end if I can wear possible stick to the same colors. So let's move onto the olive green now. And once again, you can see that I'm making all of these little dots. Once again going over any areas that are kind of sticking out. Really focusing on around the edges and trying to make them look as natural as possible. And I'm just bit by bit building up this texture. So you can see I'm honestly not doing anything fancy here just building up these spots. And although it doesn't look massively amazing right now, once we've built up all of the colors, we're going to be using four colors for this. It will have built up the texture and it will end up looking like a really realistic fluffy tree. Now I'm pretty much just doing this over the whole of the tree, regardless of if there's a darker patch. So where we put the darker brown before to mark in those darker areas, I still creating these little dots, these little circular motions over those areas as well. And you can see how nice it looks around the edge from not having a really perfectly straight line. So once I've gone through the whole tree, and I've added in the green from here, I want to move onto the next darkest color. And the same as when we were doing the grass along the bottom. I want to move onto the dark umber pencil, this is that particularly dark brown. And I'm more focusing now on those darker patches. So really anywhere where before I put down the base layers, those darker base layers, I'm looking at all of those darker patches. Now. I'm just going over them with circles for now. And actually in some areas I'm having some reasonably harsh lines around the edge of these patches, but we're going to adjust that in a little while. You can see bit by bit. This is filling up the general shape of the tree. Now I am, as I'm doing this closely, looking at the reference photo, really looking at each section as I say, it is made a lot easier because I've already marked in with the base layers where a lot of these darker patches are going to go. But I want to be, for example, following this dark patch coming down here, going around here and around here and along here. And then you get this kind of lighter circle here, for example. And that's the gist of what I'm trying to do here. So let's also, whilst we've got this brown, fill the trunk of the tree in a little bit clearer. And I want you to note that it's not all one color. Generally speaking, the middle is lighter and the bottom is darker. This branch here is darker as is this one. And this one kind of fades into the tree. There's also a dark line going up each side. So although I don't need to add absolutely tons of detail here, I do want to get those main kind of key aspects, right? So I can mark this branch here in darker. And you can see that I've already gone both sides of the trunk a little bit darker. And then I can fade this top area into the bottom area, so it's kind of lighter in the middle. And that's all I need to do for now on the trunk. So let's move on to my darkest pencil. This is the black pencil, and again, I just want to be using circular motions to go over all of these darkest parts. So exactly the same as I just did with the brown pencil. I'll go over them again and this is, as I've said before, making the tree look a little bit kind of harsh. The black is a bit much, but that's okay because we're going to work our way back down through those colors. Now, if an area is a bit darker, I can go over it more times, going over more of the area with the circular motions to build it up. In actuality, I don't want any areas to be anywhere close to a jet black, so I don't need to do too much. But you can see that that's creating a good amount of texture and a good amount of contrast. And once I work my whole way from the left to the right, I'm actually going to go back over the other way, just building up a bit more black again. Now, it's worth mentioning that in order to build up all of this texture, it is a reasonably time consuming process. So do take your time. You kind of expect it to not be done particularly quickly. I think particularly because this is the focal point of the picture, it is worth investing a bit more time into this area. I think it's the most important part. Now, before I move on from the black pencil, I'm just going to go over on the tree trunk, these absolute darkest parts again. So particularly the branch up the top up here, and the other branch next to this as well. And then we can start working our way back down through the same colors. So from here I want to move on to the brown again. And I want to go over all of those black areas. And any area that I think just needs to be made a little bit darker. So there are some areas on the tree that are particularly light like around here, for example. A lot of these areas up here and maybe around here, but most of the tree is reasonably dark, so I need to be still with these little kind of dots or these little circles still building up that texture. Just adding to what's here and kind of using it as a way to tone down that black. Also add a little bit more detail around the edge and just generally adjust the color so it's not as garish. I just think the green and the black together looks very unnatural. Right now, we want to add a reasonable amount of brown, and you can see already this is looking much more natural just from on that left hand side, building up some of that brown. So let's now go in with that darker green. And I want to put this in most places, again, like with the brown, I want to put it in most places that isn't those very light areas and that's just really slightly adjusting the color. It is still building up some of the texture, but on the most part, I think it's building the color up and making it a more natural looking color. And then once I'm happy that I've got this green everywhere I can go back down to my lightest color. And I'm being a little bit more kind of quick. I'm not worrying too much about the texture here. I am still working in those little circles. I'm not worrying about making dots anymore. And I'm pretty much just using this to blend the whole area together, so this is that lightest green. Once I've done this, I would say I am pretty happy with the tree. So at this point, I want to focus on the rest of the drawing and if there's any other small things that I want to adjust. So first up, I'm just going to use that green again. There's a few white spots down here that I think I can improve on. So I'm just going back to that olive green. Blend this out a little bit better. It's not, you don't need to do this, but I just think it looks a bit better. Maybe if you were more thorough when you drew earlier, you won't need to do this. And then I want to move on to smoothing out the sky. Earlier, we blended a lot of the sky out. Smoothed it out a lot, but I didn't go all the way down to the lightest gray. I wanted to do that after doing the hills and the tree. So I'm moving onto the lightest gray that I used earlier. And I'm just applying a firm pressure on any area that is a particularly light gray. So for example, this area around here. And you can see I'm pressing hard using circular motions, Really blending this out. I let's go all along this edge, this cloud up here. I'm being quite careful when I get near the tree. I don't want to risk smudging the leaves that I've spent so long building up. And then I want to also blend out this cloud here, so again, you can see me using those circular motions and firm pressure. Now, I would say I'm sharpening my pencil less often here because I need to apply such a firm pressure. Not only does it go down quite quickly, but if you have a really sharp pencil when trying to do this, I do find it just snaps now. It doesn't mean that you never to sharpen your pencil. It actually gets blunt quite quickly, just maybe a bit less often. And I'm going to go over this whole patch at the top up here, you can see it's not perfect, but it does smooth it out a lot. And then I can start looking for any other areas that I think need a little blend. So I'm just going to switch to the white pencil to blend out this area because I want it to be a little bit lighter. I don't want it to be as dark as when I blend with the other pencil. And then I'm kind of flitting about a bit here. So I'm now noticing the most obvious thing that I want to adjust is the line along the back of the hills here is just a little bit, it's not very clear. So let's adjust that, really define that line. And then I want to be adding in some final details like these birds here. Now these are a very simple shape. They're just a V with some quite curved wings. And actually I'm going to mark them to start with, with this is the darkest gray that we used earlier. And then once they've marked them in, I'm going to go back in a second with the black. Some of the birds are darker than others, so for example, this bird here, this bed here, this bed here, this bed here, I would say are much darker than this bed, for example. So some of the birds I do want to keep as gray, and some of them I'll go over with the black. Now again, I'm not trying to get the birds absolutely perfectly the same as on the reference photo. I am trying to get them spaced reasonably, in a reasonably similar way. Now the last thing I want to do is maybe just add a little bit of extra shading in this corner up here. I think it could stand to be a little bit darker. It is quite hard to see what I'm doing here because I've got a glare that I didn't realize from my light. But then from here, the final thing that I'll need to do is take the tape off, to just peel it very, very carefully, and then that is this landscape done. I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. 11. Summary: All right, and that is the end of this class. I hope that you've enjoyed it and it's a bit clearer to see how to build up a landscape. You want to start off by selecting a reference photo with really good contrast. You can then take the time to get the sketch nice and accurate. From here, I like to work one section at a time. So for this drawing, starting with the sky, building up the sky, initially starting by filling in the basic shapes and then adjusting the color and building it up. I can then move on to the next section. So for this drawing, that was the grass along the bottom and then add in the next section, that here was the tree. From there I can look at the picture as a whole, fill in any final details, any final color adjustments. And that's it. I always go through that same process. Now, don't forget to upload your drawings to the class projects and please do review this course. I would love to know what you think. Happy drawing guys and I'll see you in the next course.