Where: Indoors, at a table or on the floor

With: By yourself, with a friend/friends or family

What you will need:

• A flat surface to set up your landscape
• An empty shoe box or any box! If you don’t have a box, you can make one yourself from recycled cardboard or just use the surface of your table.
• Various objects to use as part of the landscape. Be creative with this and use whatever you have in your home! For example, you could collect holly/greenery from outside, recycled materials such as tinfoil/carboard/yoghurt pots as well as more festive objects like tinsel or tree ornaments, wrapping paper, fabric and napkins.
• Drawing materials such as pencils, charcoal, pens etc (again, whatever you have at hand) and paper.

Length of time: 1-2 hours

Creating your winter landscape:

What sort of landscape would you like to create?

First, think about where the landscape is. Do you want to recreate somewhere close to home or a magical far-off land? Or do you want to just start building and let it grow?

Then, think about the time of day…will it be morning, afternoon, or night-time?

Think about how you can show that it’s winter? What textures have you been noticing recently when you’ve been out and about? Is there snow or frost on the ground? Are the branches of trees bare?

Gather a range of different objects…

You will be using your imagination to turn objects into buildings, trees, people, and other parts of the landscape.

What different textures can you find around the house? Perhaps you have some leftover wrapping paper that would make a wonderful starry sky? Or if you have a Christmas tree perhaps you could borrow an ornament to be a figure?

Play! This is your time to have fun, take your time to create a wonderful space that you yourself would like to spend time in, move things about, try hanging things in the sky, perhaps a story will form in your head!

Building the main landscape…

I started by laying down a white pillowcase to be snow and creating some snowy hills in the background, but you can use whatever textures you like to build your landscape.

Perhaps you want to bring in lots of greenery from outside to create a forest or use lots of little boxes to create a town or city. You can also draw/paint directly onto the box to create the background.

Adding in details…

Now you can start to add all the fun details! You can sculpt and mould your recycled materials to be different things. It’s great to have a range of textures, some shiny, soft, spiky and smooth.

You can create little houses from folded cardboard and draw windows on. Here, I stood some small tree branches against the sides and put a bit of torn white tissue paper on top to represent snow. Use the whole space of your box to create depth and distance.

Adding people/animal/cars…

This really adds to a sense of scale. Here I used tiny pegs to be people, but you could use rolled up bits of paper, tinfoil, pine needles or anything you can think of!

Lighting…
If you have a small lamp or fairy lights which you can move, play about with moving them closer/further away. You could also switch your main light off and use a torch from a phone to create some very dramatic light and shadows.

Drawing from your landscape: choosing your angle

Cut a small rectangle out of paper and then cut a smaller window in in, this will be your frame! Now you can travel around your landscape looking through it and discovering lots of interesting viewpoints. You could even make some very quick wee sketches of different compositions on a scrap piece of paper.

Draw!

Choose your favourite composition to draw on a larger piece of paper – a4 or a3. Now you can choose your materials. Think about what will show off all your amazing textures, you can even use a range of different materials in one drawing if you like. If you stick to one colour or pencil/pen, try to capture the range of different lights and darks in your scene. For example, the brilliant brightness of snow and the black silhouette of trees. Or if you decide to use colour, you could limit your palette to 4 or 5 cool wintry colours to keep it simple. You could even do several drawings using different materials and compare them. Have fun and let your imagination bring even more magic to your seasonal scene!

Look at some other artists for inspiration....
December Snow by Eric Ravilious, 1938
Winter Landscape with Skaters by Hendrick Avercamp, 1608

We would love to see what landscapes and drawings you make this holiday, please do photograph your wonderful creations and tag @royaldrawingschool on Instagram. We can’t wait to see what you create!