Drawing Landscapes with Depth

Do you want to have your students create a landscape? Do you want to teach your class how to add depth into their landscape? It can be simple to do. The kids need to understand some simple vocabulary words.

Depth

I start off by displaying this poster (below) on the front board. It shows how to divide the paper into thirds. Students should know the front thirds is the foreground, the second third is the middle ground and the top third is the back ground. If the kids want to later on add additional layers to the middle ground they can. They can add 4 or 5 layers.

Size

The poster also points out that we will be working with size. The plants in the foreground are going to be larger and they get smaller as you place them in the middle and background. The background should have the smallest plants of all.

Repetition

Lastly, let the kids know that we are working with repetition. Any trees, bushes,  flowers, rocks and clouds etc. are repeated throughout the artwork. As long as they pay attention to getting size right.

Here is another variation of the same lesson. These projects below were created with colored pencil instead of watercolors. We used the same art vocabulary though- fore, middle and background, size and repetition. But the kids came up with these variations of the same lesson.

  

                             


What do you think of these landscape lesson. Would this project work in your art room? How do you teach landscape or depth in your art room?