Watercolor pencils are great tools for fast sketching. Start just like a pencil sketch and then add a little bit of water to blend some of the strokes. Three big tricks to help
- Keep it small. Thumbnail sketches can be just as satisfying as big landscapes and they take less time.
- Just use one color (gray or dark brown to make a monochromatic study. Faster, easier to control.
- Don’t add water over all of your pencil strokes. A little variation will help add interest to the drawing.
- Once you have some liquified pencil on the tip of your brush, paint with it, adding value to some of the white areas.
- Leave some paper white (no pencil, now brushed on pencil tone). This will enhance the contrast in your drawing.
Click on the first image to start a step-by-step slide show.
Start with a line drawing of the major elements in your landscape.
Draw a frame around the part of the landscape you wish to focus on. If you sketched out a larger landscape, you can frame just a little portion of it to develop.
Add value in three steps, a darkest area a middle value, and a lightest value. Leave some of the paper white.
Add water, one section at a time. Background areas get less contrast and are generally lighter in value.
Continue adding water to the value zones, keeping the three steps of value in mind. Note that foreground elements get more detail, and more contrast. Leave some of the whites white. Note that the vertical strokes of the foreground forest show through in the finished piece. This suggests distant trees.