Seascape
Seascape

As you can tell, I don’t draw landscapes/seascapes/whateverscapes very often. I don’t find them near as interesting as drawing the human figure. However, I do want to be able to integrate my characters into an equally interesting background, so (like with line-only drawings) I’m gonna have to do more images like this sooner or later. And well, when I did this I seriously needed a break from drawing people.

And so I hopped on over to webshots.com and looked at the different photos that they have available. I liked this one of the lighthouse, so I rendered it. I really tried to render the textures of the rocks and the land; however, capturing it on 3/4ths of an 8.5X11 sheet of paper proves difficult since the scale in landscapes so huge. Lots of minute details that make things identifiable as rocks, dirt, sand, water, and I found myself overwhelmed on my little piece of paper (the pencil lead is only so narrow.)

I really do need to tackle more images like this. Look at how I rendered the sky. The clouds are dull, formless, shapeless, and ugly. I drew a gray sky with a few curvy darkened lines. Clouds don’t look like that—they look far more interesting, more distinctive in their shapes, more detailed. And it never fails, every time I render a sky from my imagination (or, in this case, a photo) my clouds look generic. Generic clouds, generic sun ... the stuff that you learn in second grade.