How to draw buildings in a coloured pencil landscape

By Carol Leather

Buildings are one of the things we most often leave out of a landscape.

A tree or a hill forgives a loose hand, but a wall wants straight lines, a roof wants angles, and the whole thing seems to demand a kind of precision that feels like a different hobby altogether. So we edit the cottage out and draw the hill behind it instead.

That is a shame, because a building is often the very thing that makes a landscape feel real. It gives the eye somewhere to rest and a sense of scale, and it brings a quiet solidity that a field alone cannot.

This guide is about getting that solidity without the fear, by drawing the building the same way we draw everything else: as shapes, light and suggestion, not as an engineering diagram.

A building anchors the scene

Solidity is what a building brings to a landscape. Weight, permanence, the sense of something set down and staying put.

That feeling does not come from counting the bricks or ruling in every window. It comes from the big mass, from how the walls catch the light, and from the way the whole thing plants itself on the ground.

The proof is a ruin. Look at the abbey above, or a lighthouse standing alone against the weather. Half fallen, weathered raw, and yet nothing reads as more solid or more permanent.

If a crumbling wall can feel that immovable, then you do not need crisp detail to convey solidity. You need the weight. Once I understood that, buildings stopped frightening me, because I realised I was drawing their presence, not their brickwork.

See the big shape first

The shape comes before everything.

Before windows, before doors, before a single course of brick, block in the overall silhouette and the main planes of the building: which wall faces the light, which sits in shadow, where the roof cuts against the sky.

If those big shapes are right, the building will already read as a building. If they are wrong, no amount of careful detail will rescue it.

I find it helps to half close my eyes at the reference until the detail drops away and only the masses are left. That squint is the most useful tool you have for a building.

If you want to test those masses before committing to the paper, a thumbnail sketch takes two minutes and will tell you straight away whether the shape is working. It is also worth building a reference collection of buildings in different light, because the one thing you cannot invent convincingly is how the sun falls on a wall.

Let the distance set the detail

How much detail a building needs depends entirely on how far away it sits in your scene. This is the thing that saves you the most work and the most worry.

A building in the far distance is only a silhouette and a few values. A pale shape, a darker roof, a hint of shadow, and the eye fills in the rest. Try to draw every window on a distant cottage and it will look wrong, too busy for its place in the scene.

A building close to the viewer is a different job. Now you need the structure, the way the planes turn, the set of the windows, and a suggestion of the surface. Even then it is suggestion, not inventory.

This is not a rule about buildings, it is a rule about distance. Distant trees work in exactly the same way, and once you see it in one part of the scene you will start applying it everywhere.

Surface and roof: a light touch

The surface is where most people over-work a building, and it is the easiest part to hand off.

Once your shape and light are right, the brick, stone or render only needs suggesting, exactly as it does on a wall. Vary the colour, hint at a few courses, let the indented mortar trick do the work, and stop.

Light and mood

Light is what turns a drawn building into a place.

The same cottage feels entirely different in flat midday light, in low golden sun, or against a stormy sky, and choosing the light is half the picture.

Low, raking light gives you long shadows and a lit edge that models the whole form. A moody sky behind a pale building makes it glow, which is reason enough to spend some time on the clouds behind it.

When you come to the shadow side, resist reaching for black. Darker versions of the wall's own colour, or its complementary, will keep the building alive. What colour is a shadow works through why, and light and shadow in drawing covers the whole business of modelling form with light.

And a building beside still water gives you a second one for free, upside down. Drawing reflections in water shows how to handle that when the surface is calm enough to give you one.

A word on perspective

The moment a building sits at an angle to you, its lines start to converge, and that is what trips most people. The near corner is tallest, and the lines of the roof, the windows and the wall base all run back toward a vanishing point.

You do not need to measure it. A few light guide lines, sketched before you commit to any detail, will keep the whole building sitting true.

Get them down early, because unpicking perspective after you have built up colour is a miserable job.

If you would rather watch it done than read about it, my Venice buildings project works a whole street of them up from the first guide lines to the finished colour.

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