I need some direction for what to focus on. I have never really practiced landscapes before, they feel a lot more difficult than figure drawing practice. At least for timed figures practice I know that the aim is going to be practice anatomy, or gesture, or lighting and values, etc.
I genuinely don't know where to start with landscapes, on iPad no less. Should i be worried about brushes technique/familiarity with procreate brushes? Colors? Nature scenes vs manmade architecture?
Should I continue with a couple of 2 minute warm up landscapes and 1 non-timed landscape? Or would I get more mileage if i sat down with one landscape and focused on that for an hour?
Here are some simple yet solid suggestions that will help you.
First of. Draw using real paper and a lead pencil. Forget any colors for now!
I would also suggest that you go to the Scenes and Environment drawing section, or perhaps start out by trying the Basic Shapes & Still Life section, choose 30 minutes or 1 hour "class mode". You can also make some additional choices of what kind of motives you are interested in and if you want portrait or landscape format. I usually keep all the alternatives on so I get both landscapes and some architectural motives in there.
As you probably understand, those first 10 studies are so quick that there is no time for anything other than finding the biggest shape, maybe you can find where the horizon lies in the frame (even if it's not visible) and maybe you can even find a [url=]vanishing point[/url] (no straight edge, only freehand). Sketch out some of the main big shapes and then times is up and on to the next. There certainly is no time to think about color. When the time gets longer, you still use the same approach as you did on the 30 second studies but you will have more time so you will get further. This will come natural after a while. My paper sheets usually come out looking quite chaotic which is fine. I usually switch to a new paper once I'm on the 5 minutes studies.
Use the cheapest kind of paper, use a lot of it and use a soft lead pencil, 6B or 4B is a good choice.
Perfect, thank you so much for the feedback, this is exactly what I was looking for! For some reason it didn’t even occur to me that you could separate the color from the landscape, but you absolutely can! And I should, because it was way stressful to try and juggle.
I am relieved that you suggested starting with pencil and paper first because that is much more approachable, I can do paper.
I've never done gestural landscapes (or a whole lot of landscapes of any kind really), so take this with a huge grain of salt, I'm mostly drawing on my experience with still life and life drawing.
That said, my advice is: squint. When you do that, the subject separates into areas of value, you immediately see the main big forms, the structural light and shadow.
It can be really helpful to just get those areas first, before filling in value. For me, 9 times out of 10, just doing that and then filling in the shadow with a single solid value, paying no attention to the form at all, immediately makes the whole thing recognizable. It's a bit magical, goes from "uh what did I just draw" to "whoa it's Bob" in 30 seconds.
On that note, I would also really try to avoid color in the beginning: one thing I'm noticing is that there's a lot of areas separated by chroma alone. If you convert it to grayscale, you'll notice that some things are suddenly blending together, which makes it harder to navigate when capturing the form.
Mallou
13 hours ago.
