Paint an English village landscape in coloured pencil

By Peter Weatherill

This is the kind of scene that pulls a coloured pencil artist in and then quietly daunts them. There are several buildings sitting at different angles, a stone bridge, trees behind, a stream in front, a stone wall, a lavender bush, a roof full of tiles. Every one of those is something most of us have not drawn before, and trying to render the whole thing at once is the surest way to get nowhere.

The method Peter uses on this tutorial is the answer to that. Wash in the whole scene gently first with watercolour pencils, so nothing has to be perfect yet.

Then come back over the top with dry coloured pencil, one element at a time, in roughly the order the eye reads the scene. The early washes do the heavy lifting on atmosphere. The dry layers do the work of making things look like things.

If you want a different scene to practise the same combined method on, the Brokken Bridge tutorial is the companion to this one. They use the same mixed-media approach on different villages.

Paper for a Mixed-Media Landscape

Because the early stages of this drawing are wet, you need paper that can take watercolour without buckling. Anything thinner than 300gsm will warp once the washes go down, and dry pencil on a warped surface is a fight you do not want.

Hot-pressed (HP) paper has a smooth finish, which matters here because dry coloured pencil sits on top of the watercolour layers later. A rough surface would catch the pencil unevenly and the buildings would lose crispness.

Even at 300gsm you can get gentle warping with heavier washes. Stretching the paper beforehand gives you a flat working surface and is worth the small bit of preparation.

If you are tracing the outline, work to about 10 by 7 inches with a generous margin all round for mounting later. More on choosing paper for coloured pencil work generally is on the paper guide.

Tracing the Outline

The outline drawing is free to download. Print it out, trace it once onto tracing paper, flip the tracing paper over and trace it again to transfer the image to your watercolour paper. Reversed once, then reversed back, so the final drawing matches the photograph.

Tracing is not cheating. It is what working artists use to put their energy into the rendering, where the real skill lives, instead of spending it on accurate proportion before they have started colouring.

If you have not used tracing paper before, there is a full guide to tracing technique on the site.

Choosing a Watercolour Pencil Palette

For the first washes, Peter uses Staedtler Karat Aquarelles. They are less heavily pigmented than some other brands, which sounds like a weakness but is actually what you want here. Thin washes layered one over another give more control than a single strong wash, and the lower pigment load makes that easier.

The palette is deliberately small. Six pencils do the whole base layer:

• Earth Green (dark green): 55
• A simple mid green: 5
• Light olive green: 56
• Light reddish brown: 49
• Light grey: 80
• Purple grey: 08

You do not need to match these exactly. If you have an ochre rather than an olive green, that will work.

The point at this stage is to lay down warm and cool colour families and let the dry pencil work tune the final hues later. For background on warm and cool colour families, the colour basics guide is a useful detour.

A small pointed No. 5 watercolour brush is enough for this scale of work. You are not flooding the paper with water, so brush capacity does not matter much.

The method for getting wash colour off the pencils is a small ritual worth learning. Scrape pencil shavings onto a damp surface so they do not float off into the air, then dilute the scrapings into a separate dish to control the strength of each wash.

Background Trees: Soft Washes for Distance

Here is a useful trick. Peter inverts both the reference photograph and the paper, so the treetops are now at the bottom of his working area. With the paper this way up it is easier to paint the soft edge of the treetops against the buildings without your hand having to come down over the wet wash.

Work around the chimneys carefully, though you can see Peter caught a small section near the main chimney and let the green run on a little further than intended. It is the kind of small spread that vanishes once the rest of the scene is in. Most of what looks like a mistake at this stage gets absorbed later.

Build the tree section up in thin washes rather than one heavy one. The first layer is barely there. The second deepens it.

By the third or fourth pass you have the depth you want and the colour is still in your control. A single thick wash flat-out paints itself, which is exactly what you do not want this early.

For the front edge of the tree mass, mix a touch of olive green into the wash to lighten and warm it. That subtle shift forward, from a cooler distant green to a warmer near green, is what tells the eye one part of the wood is closer than the other.

A whisper of dark grey blended into the deepest tree shadows lifts the contrast at the end. Crucially, leave gaps of light green where sunlight would catch the canopy. If the tree mass is a solid even colour, it looks like a wall.

For background tree technique in more detail, including how watercolour pencil scribbles build into a tree mass, see the watercolour scribble trees page.

The same wash work continues across the rest of the buildings, just lightly enough to mark where each element will sit. This is the moment to gently erase your initial pencil tracing lines, because the base wash now holds the placement for you. Mistakes from here on get fixed when the dry coloured pencil goes over the top.

Scribbling Dry Pencils Over the Washes

With the underpainting set, Peter switches to dry coloured pencils to work on the central background trees. The pencils for this stage are Caran d'Ache Pablos: various greens, plus a couple of browns and dark greys for the shadow work.

The technique is scribble first, blend second. Lay down loose, slightly chaotic scribble layers using the side of the pencil tip, rather than careful strokes. Each scribble layer adds pigment. (For more on the different kinds of coloured pencil strokes and when each is useful, the dedicated page goes into detail.)

Then once you have three or four layers down, blend the surface by overlaying uniform shading at a 90-degree angle to the scribbles. The scribble marks disappear into the smoothed surface.

One critical point: apply the pencil in blocks that follow the shape of the tree mass, not in long horizontal or vertical strokes. Straight strokes show through and turn the trees into stripes. Block-shaped patches read as foliage.

Pay attention to light direction across the wood. The treetops on the left of the scene catch the sun and need to stay lighter. The base of the trees on the right sits in shadow and takes more dark grey and dark green. Without that asymmetry the wood looks flat and lit from nowhere.

If the scribble layers look rough at this point, that is normal. They will refine as more layers go on and as your eye moves to the foreground elements.

The background trees do not need to be precious work. They need to settle quietly behind the buildings.

Painting the Foreground Cottages

With the background trees settled, the foreground cottages are next. Peter works the left and right cottages in parallel, not because they share colours, but because the eye reads them as a pair.

If the left cottage gets fully finished before the right is even started, you cannot judge whether they sit at the right weight against each other. A bit of work on one, a bit on the other, back to the first.

The Left Cottage: Ochre Walls and Dark Roof

The first decision is the roof. Those dark tiles need to follow the perspective of the building, which means the tile lines converge towards the vanishing point at the top right corner of the wall, not running flat horizontally. Get the perspective wrong and the cottage looks like a flat sticker on the paper. If vanishing points and eye level lines are new ground, the basic perspective drawing page is the place to start.

For the tile colour, the underlying wash is grey from the earlier stage. Peter builds the tone up with broad strokes of light grey first, then bistre shading, then black to deepen the roof edge.

Some of the grey underneath should still show through, so the tiles read as separate from the deeper shadow at the edge. Two thin layers beat one heavy one, every time.

For the ochre walls themselves, colour-testing on a scrap of paper saves a lot of repair work later. Print colour and screen colour are different things, and so is the colour your eye reads on white paper versus on the printed reference. Peter recommends building a small test sheet of layer combinations before committing to the wall.

The final wall recipe came out as five colour layers plus a burnish. The order: light grey first, then apricot (which mixed surprisingly well with the grey to give an accurate ochre), green ochre, another apricot, light beige, and a finishing burnish of white.

Each layer is roughly three coverings of the paper before moving to the next. The touch stays light throughout.

Peter himself is not entirely happy with the windows at this stage. The upstairs window ledge is reading slightly off-horizontal and the windows do not look fully convincing close up.

His view: leave them for now, because once the rest of the scene is in, the eye will be too busy to dwell on them. If they still bother you at the final tidy-up, that is when to address them.

Knowing when to stop fixing and move on is a real skill.

The Right Cottage: The Packhorse

Before anything goes on the right-hand cottage, there is a compositional decision to make. The wall is white in the photograph, but white pulls the eye hard, and the focal point of the painting is meant to be the bridge.

Leaving the right wall pure white risks the eye landing there first and then having to be dragged back to the bridge. A faint cream cast warms the wall and quiets it just enough.

The roof of the right cottage starts with English Red, applied in a row of small circles along the roof peak and then filled in across the top edge. The green of the trees behind is then brought right up to that red line so there is no white paper showing between them.

Red and green are complementary colours, opposite on the colour wheel. When they meet they spark off a small visual vibration that draws the eye. Peter uses that deliberately here, because the right cottage is part of the path the eye should travel to reach the bridge.

Below the top line of red, a row of apricot suggests the paler tiles at the very top of the roof. Then the black and white timbered fascia gets tidied up with dark grey and ivory black, using a sharp point and a small ruler to keep the edges crisp.

Roof Tiles Without Drawing Every One

The tiles on this roof are in full sunshine. Although they read as grey, they are warm in tone with very little shadow except for the small vents at the top edge.

The underpainting is already grey, so a white base goes down first to keep the tones light when colour is added over the top. The trick with the white base is to shade in the direction the roof runs: horizontal lines along each row of tiles, and slightly angled vertical lines reflecting the way the roof falls towards the viewer.

You will see very little change in surface colour as you apply the white, so hold the paper to the light occasionally to check the coverage is even.

Moss Green and Blue Jeans go over the white base. The tile rows get marked out with a very sharp Cocoa-coloured pencil.

There are 16 rows of tiles on that roof, so the spacing works by halves: divide the roof in half top to bottom, then halve each half, then halve again, then split each into two. Peter then burnishes with white to even out the overall colour and let the tile edges sit back into the surface so they do not shout.

To finish, lift small highlights with an eraser where individual tiles catch more light, and add Mouse Grey along some edges to deepen specific tiles. Suggesting tiles, not drawing every one.

For more on tile and roof technique generally, see Peter's how to draw a roof page.

The Right Cottage Walls and Surrounding Trees

With the roof done, work moves down the building. The shadows under the window and beneath the roof gutter are light blue in the reference, but a bright blue applied straight to the white wall would jump out.

Peter underlays a light coat of Steel Grey first, then the blue goes over the top muted by what is underneath. Two layers, the second at right angles to the first, gives an even finish even when the touch is feather-light.

Watch out for the tree branches that overhang the roof and end wall of the right cottage. Leave clear space for the greens to be filled in later, otherwise you end up with hard pencil edges showing through the foliage.

The small tree area to the left of the cottage is built up with scribble strokes in a selection of greens. The cottage wall edge is held by a straight-edged stroke of mid green so it stays crisp.

The bar that holds the inn sign was dark in the reference, but Peter chose to keep it white because it reads better against the surrounding greens. A final burnish of yellow green keeps this small tree mass lighter than the larger bank of trees behind, which helps it sit forward in space.

For the tree growing against the right cottage wall, the first scribble layers are the palest greens available. This is critical: shadow layers come later, and if the base goes down too dark there is no way back. Lightest colours first, always.

The Stone Garden Wall

The garden wall in front of the right cottage gets a similar layered treatment. Shadows go in first with a light warm grey.

Do not get caught up on exactly which grey. You will use a variety of greys on this wall and they all work as steps in a progression rather than one specific colour. A slightly darker grey adds scribble lines following the wall's perspective in rows across its surface.

Then comes the small variation that lifts the wall from grey blocks to actual stone: light touches of apricot and ochre, very gentle, suggesting that not every stone is the same colour. Build the little shadow areas around individual stones using the reference as a general guide rather than copying stone by stone.

Then scribble greens into the overhanging tree, starting just a shade darker than the underpainting, adding cross-scribbles with lighter greens and yellow greens.

Tree shadows over the wall come next, and the wall's own shadows get strengthened to match. More on rendering stone works through these layering choices in finer detail.

The fiddly details are next: window boxes, the three pots outside The Packhorse (which, for the record, is let as holiday apartments and has its name added to the sign board), and the small touches of greenery alongside the base of the house wall.

Shadows are what make every one of these elements read as three-dimensional. The pots become pots because of their cast shadows. The window boxes stick out from the wall because shadows fall beneath them. The foliage has form because dark shapes nestle inside the lighter masses.

A faint touch of detail goes into the thatched cottage in the far background too, but only a faint touch. If it gains too much detail or tonal strength it stops sitting in the distance and starts competing for attention. A line or two of road edge gets sketched in and that is enough for now.

Here is a useful thing to see at this point: another artist's version of the same area, worked with a different brand of pencils and a slightly different colour selection.

Notice the perspective adjustment she had to make on the wall stonework. The result is genuinely different to Peter's. Not wrong, just different.

A different hand and a different palette will always produce a different drawing of the same scene, and that is the point. You are not trying to replicate Peter's drawing. You are using his method to make your own.

The Central Building

Colour printing varies a lot, so your reference may not show the true reds of the central building's brickwork. Peter recommends checking your print against the close-up reference below and choosing a small selection of natural reds to match.

From the Pablo range, the useful reds are Dark Carmine, Bordeaux Red, Mahogany, English Red and Venetian Red. The darker reds will be needed for small tile areas. You will also want cool and warm greys, Sepia, Slate Grey and Cream. The Polychromos box has some useful additions if you have access to one.

A PDF close-up of the central building is available to download, useful for checking detail as you work.

The Tile Roof

The central roof has 13 rows of tiles plus a top capping row. Roughly speaking, you would need at least 10 rows drawn in if you tried to render each tile individually. You will not be doing that.

Squint at the reference and you will see the tiles appear in vertical rows rather than horizontal ones. That is because the sun is coming from the left, and the ridged tiles catch shadow that way. The job, then, is to emphasise vertical lines when you mark out the tile pattern.

Peter starts with horizontal strokes in patches of Venetian Red and Dark Carmine, working three or four colours through the roof area. Remember that the shadow lines for the tile rows come later, so the underlying colour patches need straight edges that will fit the eventual tile pattern.

The shadowed edges around the windows get marked with Umber, and the top and bottom edges of the roof get the same treatment. This gives you the boundaries to work within. The big central chimney stack is left for now, until you have practised on the rest of the brickwork. It is too central to the composition to risk getting wrong first time.

The next pass uses a ruler across the six light lead-strip areas at the tops of the gables, to make sure they are all level. Then Peter adds slightly off-vertical shading in line with the tile rows.

Perspective matters here. The tile rows straight in front of you sit vertical, but the ones on either side slope slightly. That subtle slope is what sells the curve of the roof when the final layers go down. Level up the bottom edge of the roof and re-align the shadows around the windows while you are at it.

The shading looks rough at this stage, but it sorts itself out as more layers go down. Adding more light colour layers across the whole roof, then refining the shadow edges with Bistre (a cool grey-brown), starts to bring the surface together.

If the three gable windows are not coming out evenly sized from the underpainting, that is a problem worth fixing before finishing the roof. Tidy the shadows either side of the white window spaces so all three openings look the same size, then finish the roof off.

The tile shadow lines go in next, with charcoal grey, freehand, very lightly. Even at the lightest touch they will read too strong at first. A further colour layer on top settles them back.

Peter burnishes the whole roof area with Bluish Pale Pablo. That is a particularly useful colour for blending colour back into the mid or background range without flattening it.

There are six panes in each upstairs window. The technique for keeping them aligned is to draw the three left-hand vertical lines first (allowing for the curtain), then add the six horizontal top and base lines across all three windows together. That way the four corners of the three pane sets line up with each other.

Some of the white curtains are in shadow and some in sun. Two of the windows are open in the reference. Peter chose to keep the left-hand windows shut in this version. Slate Grey works for the main window detailing, with Ivory Black darkening the centre areas.

A battery eraser tidies up the white outside edges of each window afterwards. Any small bits that need more work can wait until the final tidy-up pass at the end.

The Cottage Wall

The wall on the left side of the central building is a redder sandstone than the older stonework on the right side. Peter starts with Bordeaux Red (Pablo) for the left section. The first colour choice is a little arbitrary, because later layers will warm or cool it as needed.

The next layer of English Red blends into the mortar gaps, softening the brick-by-brick definition. A final burnish over the whole area further unifies the layers.

Do not get wound up about getting exactly the right colour at the start. The under layer determines the outcome more than you might expect, and the layers on top let you correct your direction as you go.

For the variation between the left and right ends of the wall, Peter uses the same two or three colours over the whole surface, but adds a light first layer of white or Ivory only on the right-hand side. This makes the right side noticeably lighter without needing a different colour palette.

To make this work, fill in the darker stones on the right corner of the building first. The under-layer of white or ivory needs to be thinner where you want the chimney stones to read darker. There is real pressure put into laying down the colours over this, and the difference between sample five on the right and sample two on the left shows the effect of that first white layer.

Keep an eye on the reference for the small details: the house name plate at the front door should be left clear, and the vertical stones over the door and windows should be shown. The shadow areas from the roof overhang go in later when the wall gets its final burnish.

The climbing roses around the brickwork are simpler than they look. They are scribbles of one very dark green (Pablo Olive Black) laid over the light green underpainting. More on stone and brick rendering generally is on the drawing buildings page.

The Packhorse Bridge

The bridge is where you want the viewer's eye to land first. That means the strongest contrasts in the whole drawing need to live in this area. Two specific places carry that contrast: the lavender at the foot of the bridge path, and the far archway where deep shadow meets bright sunlight on the stone.

The top of the bridge parapet gets a light warm grey. Then a scribble layer of Sepia goes onto the shadowed stonework either side of the parapet. It can go darker than this in the final touches, but at this stage it is enough to establish the value.

Leave the path along the top of the bridge as white paper for the weeds. Then work in a mixture of ochre and grass green with a touch of mid Olive Green for shadow, building up the weedy effect. Be careful to leave the area on the near side of the path clear for the blue lavender, which will sit against the dark shadow of the inside arch.

That inside archway shadow is built in two passes. A thin layer of ochre first, to establish the underlying stone colour. Then a firm layer of Ivory Black on top.

That first ochre layer matters: it stops the black from being a "dead" colour while still letting you build the intense dark you need. The bushes down to the waterside are worked next, with shadows punched in using dark green and black. For the bridge's reflections in the water, the drawing reflections page covers the underlying principles.

The lavender itself is a mixture of light Violet and Sky Blue, with the edges cut back in with Black. Small touches, sharp pencil, careful work.

With the bridge in place, the focal point is doing its job. Looking around the rest of the scene, Peter can see the thatched cottage in the background is reading too light, and the pot plants on the right need some tidying. Almost everywhere you look at this point, there will be shadows to deepen and edges to clean up. That is the next pass, and it is one of the more satisfying parts of the work.

Final Touches: Bringing the Scene Together

The railed-off area on the left side of the bridge gets attention first. Shadow lines go in before the foliage behind, with a green line above (which loses itself into the bushes at the rear) and a Sepia line below (which catches the railing shadow).

The thatched cottage in the far background gets a couple of grey layers to push it back into the distance. Without those layers it competes with the bridge for attention; with them, it settles quietly into its place.

The road in the foreground takes two very light layers: a cold Grey first, then Sky Blue. Peter then blends the whole road surface with a white pencil to smooth it out and quiet it down.

The pot plants on the right-hand patio get some more careful work to lose the artificial look they had in the early stages. A few weeds go in under the right-hand wall. The shadows on that wall, and on the tree against the right-hand house, get strengthened. A grey and a Sepia pencil bring up one or two more shadows where they help anchor the elements.

What You've Learned

Peter's method on this drawing is more important than the specific colours and brand of pencils he chose. The principle that carries across to any landscape you tackle is this: wash in the whole scene gently first, so nothing has to be perfect yet, then come back over the top with dry coloured pencil, one element at a time, working in the order the eye naturally reads the scene.

A few specific things to take into your own work:

• Two thin layers always beat one heavy one, whatever you are rendering.
• Suggest surfaces rather than catalogue them. A few well-placed shadows do more than fifty carefully-drawn details.
• Test your colour combinations on a scrap of paper before committing to the picture. Print colour and screen colour are different things, and so is the colour your eye reads on white paper.
• Manage where the eye goes. If a feature is competing with your focal point, soften it. If your focal point is not pulling enough attention, sharpen it.
• Knowing when to stop fixing is a real skill. Some things you can leave; the viewer's eye will be too busy elsewhere to dwell on them.

If you would like a different scene to practise the same method on, the Brokken Bridge tutorial is the companion to this one. And the landscape hub covers the underlying principles for any landscape you want to tackle next, from light direction to composition to building specific elements like trees, skies and water.

Six Versions of the Same Scene

You may be wondering what other artists made of this exercise. The original tutorial was an online group exercise, and six of the participants kindly shared their finished drawings. They are well worth a look. Different pencil brands, different papers, different hands, different choices throughout. Each one is recognisably the same Allerford scene, and each one is also unmistakably its own picture.

That is the point of working from a method rather than copying a finished piece. Your version will be different too, and that is the right outcome.

Well done to all of you who sent your results, and to anyone else who worked through the exercise but did not submit a finished picture. If you are reading this and you would like to add your own version to the gallery, get in touch and Peter will be glad to include it.

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