Depth with Line

Hi, my name is Stuart Lockridge. I wanna talk about depth with line. It's, it's depth pared down to its most basic element. Just drawing with line. I'm not using atmospheric color. I'm not using a uh you know, a muted smoky blue for the distant mountain and a vibrant, dark green for the foreground. No, I'm just trying to create depth which is background, middle ground foreground with line. So when I have classes in landscape, this is one of the most important pieces I teach with uh the students. And so uh most confusing scene can often be simplified down into the line. So I just wanna illustrate quickly these, these concepts. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna say, let's uh let's take this concept here of going back in my memory to a little creek that one of the students was drawing and the creek kind of came down the hill doing this and he was drawing this way and then trying to figure out some grasses here and doing this and it was, you know, it was complicated. He was, he was lost. So I came back and I said, all right, let's just break this down into it's contours expressed with line and working the depth. So this is the background here and the contours come down like this, these, this is in front and goes down to there. So these contours are behind and then this contour comes in front right there and these contours go like this and so on, right? All of a sudden there's this, there's this depth and I call this the visibility and the and the visible side and the invisible side. So this hill goes down behind that hill. So this is really when I'm off sketching and using my shorthand technique, I don't draw all these contour lines, I think about them a lot, but I don't draw them all the time. But I'm always always thinking about that line coming down. And is there a plane or a contour of land in front of it? If there is, then I need to express that line in front of that one and then it can do this and then say there's a line in the distance, right? We can talk about pressure, say draw the background line, very light, the middle ground a little darker and then the foreground line really dark. All right. That's great. That's great. But I'm talking about all the same pressure, all the same line. So this right here is an example of creating a very simple depth with line, this looks like layering, you know, hills going into the background, you can take that same concept and apply it to water trees, rocks, land, whatever it is, even the portrait. So we can as, as long as when you're sketching, when you're out in front of nature, just to be super attentive to the contour of an item coming up against the contour of another item and doing this. If you can capture that, if you can capture this all throughout your piece and what line is in front of what line and keep control of that? You're gonna be, uh you're gonna be moving your sketch along much faster. You're gonna see the depth quicker and you're gonna be able to lay those colors and tones in uh with a much better understanding and you're also just gonna see a really cool drawing. So I hope that's helpful to your being out and sketching in the field. Thanks.