If your landscape sketch doesn’t turn out the way you want, it doesn’t mean you’ve chosen a bad subject or that you can’t sketch. Often flat-looking or confusing paintings come from not having a clear structure for your landscape sketch.
To capture what interests you in a scene and show it on paper, you can use a few helpful design principles that will organize your sketch in a visually appealing manner: aspects like big shapes, composition, color are all important to figure out. One of the most helpful tools in your sketching belt is value.
Value describes the degree of lightness or darkness of an object or scene, from the highlight to the deepest shadow. It also tells us where the light comes from in a scene.
Value is a core element of a landscape sketch. It helps you to give a sketch a framework. Value comes before color, and can be more important than your color choices to hold your sketch together. Let’s take a closer look at it.
Maybe you’ve seen a value scale like this before:
This scale is just a way to describe the different changes between light and dark in your sketch. Light and dark values in nature are way more nuanced, but for sketching we can’t possibly recreate this. So limiting our values to a few light and dark steps is much more practical. Usually 4-5 values are enough though, even a ten step value scale is a bit complex for sketching.
Value is a versatile tool. It will bring your sketch to life because it adds light and shadow: this creates a feeling of three-dimensionality and volume and depth. This effect is far more important than choosing colors – you can use those later to add more mood and emotion.
Let’s take a look at how you can figure out the values in your scene in an early stage of sketching. I like to explore values in small thumbnails (which are another amazing technique for figuring out the mechanics of your sketch), or with a dedicated small value study. Here’s a video in which I go through this process:
Landscape Sketching Fundamentals: The Power of Value (video lesson)
This video is an outtake of my new course Landscape Sketching Fundamentals which I just published – a foundational landscape sketching class that will teach you basic landscape sketching skills in-depth and in a structured approach.
You can take it as a self-directed class or, as an intensive 6-week course with structured assignments and individual feedback from me. There will be assignments and lots of exercises, and my guidance for the entire 6 weeks.
No matter which version, the course is a great introduction to landscape sketching, and you will keep access to all class materials (over 10 hours of video lessons and PDFs!) afterwards. It is my most comprehensive course yet, and I’ve put everything I know to be valuable about landscape sketching into it.
Sign up here:
Self-directed class
6-week class with individual feedback
