Sketching a loose plan from a photo
Okay. Last lesson was where to put stuff, working by feel, no rule of thirds police showing up at your door. Today we take that feel and put pencil to paper before any paint touches anything.
This is the step people want to skip. I get it. You want to be mixing color, not sketching like it's still 7th grade art class. But five minutes of loose pencil lines now saves you from a painting that goes sideways at minute twenty, when you're already committed and the water's already down.
Pick your photo first
Go back to whatever reference photo you've been eyeing for this landscape. Doesn't have to be fancy. Something on your phone from a hike, a shot out your car window at the point of the mountain, whatever. If you don't have one you love, that's fine, grab any landscape photo with a horizon line, some middle stuff, and something in front. We're not judging the photo. We're judging what we do with it.
I still stand by this: paint from a photo, not from your imagination, especially this early. Your brain lies to you about color and shape. It'll tell you a mountain is "mountain-colored" and a tree is "green." The photo won't lie. Look at the actual pixels.
The sketch itself: three lines, tops
Here's the whole method. Grab a regular pencil, something soft, nothing mechanical and scratchy. On your paper, lightly draw:
- The horizon line. Where does sky meet land. That's it. One line.
- The big shapes. Mountain silhouette, the shoreline of a lake, the edge of a field, whatever your "far" thing is. Keep it simple, don't chase every bump.
- One or two anchor points up front. A tree, a rock, a fence post, something that tells the eye "this is close." You don't need detail. You need a shape and its rough location.
That's the whole sketch. Three passes, maybe two minutes of pencil work. If you're drawing more than that, you're overdoing it. This is a map, not a drawing you're going to be graded on.
Press light. Really light. You're going to paint over this, and if your pencil lines are heavy they'll show through your washes, especially in light areas like sky. A phantom gray line under a pale blue wash is annoying and permanent. Light hand, or use a kneaded eraser to knock it back after you sketch if it looks too dark.
What you're actually deciding
The sketch isn't about getting the mountain shape "right." It's about deciding, on paper, before pigment: where's my horizon, where's my far stuff, where's my close stuff. Once that's down you're not making those decisions mid-wash with a loaded brush hovering over wet paper, which is a bad time to be having an existential crisis about composition.
I'll be honest, composition rules aren't my strong suit. I don't sit there calculating thirds. I look at the photo, I ask "what's the first thing my eye goes to," and I make sure that thing has room to breathe on the paper. That's the whole system. Works for me. Your mileage may vary.
A caution here, actually
If you're using a photo on your phone, prop it up somewhere you're not going to knock it into your water jar. Sounds dumb until it happens. Phone screens and watercolor water do not mix, ask me how I know.
Don't skip the ugly test sketch
Do this sketch on scrap paper first if you're nervous, or right on your good sheet if you're feeling brave. Either way, don't erase and re-erase and re-erase trying to get it perfect. A slightly wonky mountain silhouette is fine. You're not drafting blueprints. You're giving your brush a rough trail to follow.
Which brings me to the actual finish line here, or the lack of one. None of my paintings get framed. None of them get entered anywhere, sold, put in a show, any of that. My best sky wash from last year is taped to the fridge with a magnet from a pizza place, and that is genuinely the highest honor a painting gets in my house. I mean that. The sketch you're about to do isn't leading toward some big reveal moment. It's leading toward you sitting with your paper and your water and seeing what happens. That's the whole point, honestly, more than whatever ends up stuck to a fridge.
So don't get precious about the sketch either. If it's wrong, redraw it. If it's still wrong, redraw it again. Paper's cheap. That's kind of the whole philosophy around here.
Before next time
Pick your reference photo and do the three-line sketch at home if you've got ten quiet minutes, light pencil, nothing fancy. Bring it next time and we'll start laying in that first wash together.