How to Draw Buildings in Coloured Pencil Without Drawing Every Brick

Drawing buildings in a coloured pencil landscape is less about perfect brickwork and more about giving the viewer enough structure to believe the scene.

Use indented mortar lines, varied colour, consistent light direction, and selective shadow to suggest brick or stone without drawing every detail. This works because the eye completes the pattern. The guide covers brick walls, archways, perspective, and dry stone walls.

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A building can make a landscape feel solid, but it can also make you freeze up — especially when you start thinking about every brick, stone, and mortar line.

Drawing buildings with coloured pencils works better when you stop trying to copy every detail and start looking for the patterns that matter. A few convincing edges, shadows, colour shifts, and perspective lines can do far more than hundreds of carefully drawn bricks.

In this guide, we’ll look at how to suggest brickwork and dry stone walls so they sit naturally in a landscape without taking over the whole drawing.

Look before you draw

Before you pick up a pencil, spend some time studying the walls around you. Photograph sections of wall in different light. Build a reference collection of your own.

What you'll notice is that bricks are far more varied than the neat terracotta rectangles most of us picture. Edges crumble and round with age. Colours shift from brick to brick. Mortar lines vary from deep, shadowed grooves to thin, barely visible marks. Some walls have gaps where mortar has fallen away entirely.

Here are the things worth paying attention to:

• The overall colour variation between individual bricks
• Whether the bricks are new or old, salvaged or weathered
• How deep the mortar sits, and what colour it is
• Where shadows fall at the edges of each brick
• How all of this changes depending on the light

If you can, compare walls in different areas. A Victorian terrace in a city centre looks nothing like a country cottage. Those differences come from the materials available locally, how the bricks were fired, and how many decades of weather they've absorbed.

Not just the bricks: the mortar matters too

This caught me off guard when I first started paying attention. Mortar makes up around 18% of a brick wall's surface. That's nearly a fifth of what you're looking at, so it needs to be part of your drawing, not an afterthought.

The mortar's colour and depth change the whole character of a wall.

Deep-set mortar creates strong shadow lines in sunlight. Shallow mortar with a white mix makes the grid pattern stand out even without much shadow. Older walls often have tighter joints with barely visible mortar, which gives them a completely different feel from modern construction.

The technique: suggesting bricks, not drawing every one

Here's the approach that works well for buildings in a landscape scene:

First, indent the mortar lines into your paper using a ballpoint pen, stylus, or bone folder. Press firmly enough to create grooves, but not so hard you tear the surface.

Then build your colour with the pencil held at an angle, so the pigment skips over the indented lines and leaves them showing through. This gives you the mortar grid without having to carefully paint around each line.

From there, vary the tone and colour across individual bricks. Add shadows to the lower and side edges where each brick stands proud of the mortar. The lit edge is usually the top, where sunlight catches it.

For the shadows themselves, resist reaching for black. Darker reds and violets, or the complementary colour (green for red bricks), will look far more natural and keep the wall feeling alive.

One thing to watch: keep your light direction consistent across the whole wall. Check which side of each brick catches the light and make sure they all agree. It's easy to flip this accidentally when you're focused on one small area.

Brick archways

Archways add real interest to a building scene, but the curving brickwork brings extra challenges. As the bricks follow the curve, the angle of light changes on each one, and the mortar lines fan outward rather than running in neat parallels.

Our Garden Arch tutorial walks you through a full coloured pencil archway step by step, including how to handle the light changes around the curve and how to keep the brickwork looking natural rather than mechanical.

A word on perspective

If you're drawing a building straight on, mortar lines stay horizontal and life is simple. But the moment the wall sits at an angle to you, those lines start converging toward a vanishing point, and you need to account for that.

You don't need to calculate it precisely. A few light guide lines sketched in early will keep your brickwork tracking correctly. Our perspective guide explains how vanishing points work if this is new territory for you.

The important thing is to get those guide lines down before you start rendering bricks. Fixing perspective after you've built up layers of colour is not something you want to do. I've learned that one the hard way.

Never got the hang of perspective? I've laid it out simply for you in my basic perspective drawing guide and its accompany pages on one and two point perspective. 

Dry stone walls

Dry stone walls are built without any mortar at all. The stones are fitted together by hand, relying entirely on the skill of the craftsman to create a solid structure from whatever the local land provides. Larger stones form the base, with progressively smaller stones fitted and wedged above them.

You'll find them across Scotland, Northern England and Wales, often running for miles across open hillside. When they're well built, they last centuries with almost no maintenance.

What makes them interesting to draw is the variety. Every stone sits at a slightly different angle, catching the light differently. The gaps between stones create their own pattern of deep shadows. And because the materials come from the local landscape, the wall always feels like it belongs in the scene.

If you'd like to take that same texture work further, this stone landscape tutorial shows how to draw realistic rock surfaces as the focus of a full Dartmoor scene.

Drawing a dry stone wall

The technique is more forgiving than brickwork because the irregularity is the point. No need for perfectly straight mortar lines or consistent shapes.

Start with your lightest colours and work through progressively darker tones, finishing with your deepest shadows in the gaps between stones. Try to avoid reaching for black. Darker versions of the stone colours, deep browns, blue-greys, purples, will look far more natural.

Paper choice makes a difference here. A sheet with some tooth to it (hot-pressed watercolour paper works well) will let the pigment catch unevenly across the surface, which naturally mimics the gritty texture of stone.

Pay attention to the direction of your strokes. Grass around the wall base needs long vertical marks. The wall stones work better with horizontal strokes that follow the line of construction. That contrast in stroke direction helps separate the two textures.

Look for contrast in your reference, too. A wall where the lower section sits in shadow, with sunlit grass in the field beyond, will give you far more to work with than one in flat, even light.

Where to go next

If your landscape includes a roof, our page on drawing roofs covers tiles, thatch and shingles.

For the full picture of how buildings fit alongside trees, skies and water in a complete scene, head to our coloured pencil landscape guide.

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