Artists Sketching in the White Mountains by Winslow Homer, 1868, oil painting. Plein air painting is about leaving the four walls of your studio behind and experiencing painting and drawing in the landscape. The practice goes back for centuries but was truly made into an art form by the French Impressionists.
Styles of Plein Air Drawing
For formative practice, create a drawing of different landscape scenes, in each of the styles listed below:
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Modified Blind Contour Drawing:
Draw with a Sharpie marker, one continuous line as a modified blind contour drawing. |
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Contour Drawing:
Draw the scene using contour line while incorporating a variety of line styles (thick, thin, dark, light, angular, organic, etc.) |
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Shaded:
Use the side of your pencil lead and shade in darker tones of the scene while including contour lines and detail. |
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Loose & Free Gesture:
With charcoal or soft pastel, draw what you see in a loose, flowing and free style. This should be like a gesture drawing where you draw fairly quickly while capturing the movement of the forms. |
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Blocking in Form:
With the side of a compressed charcoal stick, block in or draw the "dark" shapes that are scene within the landscape. Again, this is a loose, quick drawing to build layering and form within the composition. |
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Controlled Line & Detail:
Find an object or scene that is close in proximity. Crop the most important aspects of the composition with a view finder and focus on those areas for your drawing. This drawing should take the most time because it requires the most detail and observation. |
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Negative Space:
Shade in the space around objects leaving the objects within the landscape bare. |
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Bring It All Together with a Splash of Color:
Choose a subject matter for your composition that has balance and texture. Using all of the above techniques, draw the composition on a toned paper. Add shading and a bit of color by using gauche paint or soft pastel chalk to enhance the drawings depth and aesthetic qualities. |
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