The “Nuts and Bolts”
of Landscape Drawing
Many of us are inspired by the overwhelming beauty of the natural world. However, you may find
that once you are in the landscape, the subject, with its vastness and complexity, is very difficult to
scale down to a sketchbook-sized image. For this reason, one of the most useful tools of the land-
scape artist is a viewfinder.A viewfinder is to the artist what looking through a camera’s viewfinder is to the photographer. It’s a way of isolating a sub-
ject and seeing how the arrangement of the big shapes of your subject, once scaled down, is going to look within the format
of your paper.
You can make a readily accessible and inexpensive viewfinder using two right-angle corners of mat board, held together with
paper clips to mimic the format of your paper (a).
You can hold up the viewfinder with one hand and view your subject through it while sketching the landscape on your paper
with the other hand (b). By bending your arm, you can “zoom in or out” to either crop your subject closely or to allow a lot of
space around the objects that you would like to draw.
a b