Drawing Landscape Architecture

Drawings of landscapes and landscape architecture

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Yann Kebbi. Sketch from the collection Winter break, 2013. Colored pencils.

This page of small simple sketches beautifully records different landscape scenes. The strong colors help underline the atmospheres.

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Yukiko Suto, Alley in Chiang Mai, 2009. Pencil and colored pencil on paper.

This amazingly detailed drawing displays how textures can be used to depict a landscape. The different sizes of leaves become finer with distance and create depth in the image.

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Jochen Schittkowski, Positano, Santa Maria Assunta. 2014. Pen and watercolors.

A relation between a building, it’s urban context - a topography of roofs, and it’s relation to the surrounding landscape - the hills around the town of Positano, is beautifully shown with the use of color. Only the church and it’s compositional counterpart, the hill in the background, are colored, while the rest is left monochromatic.

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Egon Schiele, Houses And Pines. 1915.

There is a lot of empty space in this Schiele’s landscape drawing. But still, it seems to fill the whole area with a feeling of a landscape. The few lone trees placed in the upper part create a depth and illusion of a perspective. Through this reduction the drawing remains open - open for our own interpretation of what the missing landscape could be. 

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Stephanie Bower, Versailles, 2013. Pencil, pen and watercolors.

This study sketch of Versailles shows how perspective in the garden is designed to work in an illusory way. The drawing reveals different tricks Le Nôtre, the designer of the garden, used to manipulate the view. A great analysis through drawing.

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Yohji Kato, pencil and watercolors. 2015.

Apart from the beautiful textures the use color is what stands out in this landscape drawing. The few sprinkled spots create a focal point, depth and perfectly fit into the composition.

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Marc Holmes, Volterra, 2015. Watercolour.

For this Sunday evening we found a watercolour painting showing the landscape surrounding Volterra. The balanced realistic colour palette successfully conveys the harmony of the picturesque Tuscan landscape itself. 

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Aureline Cantou, Corse, colored pencils.

The use of color in this drawing creates a beautiful depth in the image. The strong contrast blue line of the horizon sets the background and then reappears in the middle distance, setting the scale. The hill up front is drawn with the most intensive green color and texture, thus appearing close.

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Sara Midda, South of France, 2008.

These two sketches are a wonderful example of what can be achieved with texture. By only drawing different textures of plants and fields with different stroke lengths and thicknesses, certain depth, contrast and composition are achieved in the sketches. 

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Aureline Cantou, Creuse, pencil and charcoal.

The combination of pencil and charcoal create a wide range of grey values that describe this landscape. Pencil was used to wonderfully depict fine textures such as birches or grass. Charcoal, on the other hand, creates the dark contrast of the spruces.

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A drawing by grupoarena on Flickr. 2007.

The flowing abstracted lines of the drawing clearly catch the caracter of this spall piece of landscape. At the same time the fluid compsition creates a balanced image.

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DLA is back from a long vacation! We’ve moved, had some rough months and now finally settled. Time to write about drawing landscapes again!

For a fresh start this beautiful abstract landscape by Veronica de Arriba (2011). Clear forms and strong colours help flatten the image and abstract the landscape to a degree, where we can easily read it’s physical components.

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George Butler, Sacre Coeur, Paris. Pen and watercolour.

What we draw is in a sketch equally important as what we decide not to draw. By emitting information, we can reveal what otherwise wouldn’t be visible in a flood of visual information. Our brain works in the same way. When looking at a view it emits information and enables us to focus only on what we believe important.

In this sketch only the church is drawn. The rest of the hill is left blank, which allows us to focus on the architecture. The steps, the traffic sign and the person in the front are added to create a dynamic vertical composition.

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Struan Teague, Carrara quarry, Italy. 2 colour lithograph print.

This abstract axonometric drawing of a marble quarry revels the geometry this man made landscape. Because axonometric projection is used instead of perspective, we can easily read the architecture of the landscape depicted in the drawing.

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Paul Balmer, pencil.

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Tomek Włoga, 2014. Pen and watercolor.

In this drawing the author used color in a reverse way. The object of interest, the chapel at the edge of the town, is left white, while the background and the sky are painted with watercolors. This frames the chapel and makes it stand out. What is interesting, is that through this a second point of interest was created - a magnificent view of the landscape through the portal in the wall.

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Benedict O'Looney, Manienplatz Munich, 2009. Pencil and colour pencil.

The drawing has a fantastic composition of diagonals and horizontal thirds. The point of interest (city hall) is most detailed, while the rest, like the roofs in the background, is abstracted into lines. This enables the landmarks in the drawing to stand out.