Flat Top Mesa Vistas

By: Harrison How, excerpted from Draw the Great Outdoors

By: Harrison How, excerpted from Draw the Great Outdoors

Perched atop mesas, flat-topped plateaus offer breathtaking vistas of the surrounding landscape. These expansive views, stretching towards the horizon, provide a sense of vastness and grandeur. Before we embark on capturing the breathtaking vistas from a flat-topped mesa, let’s equip ourselves with some essential artistic tools! Fear not, fellow artists, for these tools are far simpler than they might seem. We’ll be learning how to break down these majestic formations into basic shapes, allowing you to confidently translate their grandeur onto paper.

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INSTRUCTIONS

Rocks

Solid in their simplicity, rocks are a strong staple for many of our landscape drawings. They might seem daunting at first, but like many natural wonders, rocks can be simplified into basic shapes. This little tutorial will show you how to transform a couple of jagged ovals into a convincing pile of rocks, building the foundation for your future landscape drawings.

Start with a couple jagged half-circle shapes in a line.
Add a small pebble or two underneath the rocks.

Draw the ground they’re resting on with a few horizontal strokes. For a half-buried look, have one small line across the bottom with a few diagonal strokes on each side.
Add jagged diagonal strokes across the center of your rocks.
Shade your rocks with diagonal dashes on the bottom and along the opposite side of your light source (in this example, the sun is at the top right).

Desert Chaparral

Short, stout bushes, despite their spiky nature, can be drawn using a series of layered shapes, transforming them into a spiky haven of shade and protection for small creatures in your landscapes.

Draw a cloud-like shape with a flat bottom and squiggly roundish top.

Layer this shape as many times as you like to create a fuller bush.
Shade in your bushes, leaving a light outline between your layers.

Juniper Tree

Despite their potentially rugged appearance, junipers are super simple to draw. This tutorial will show you how to break down a juniper tree into basic shapes, layer by layer, until you have a convincing shrub tree to add to your landscape drawings.

Make a gnarled trunk by drawing two lines that come up from the ground and branch out at the top.
Add branches with sporadic V shapes from the top of the trunk.
Cap your branches at their tops and draw a spiky tree shape around them in any shape that feels right to you.
Shade in your foliage.

Add a few veiny lines to the trunk for a bark effect.

Spiny Succulent

These plants are great at storing moisture in the desert and ward off those looking for a drink with thick skins and scary spikes! Tough on the outside but beautiful, their unique forms can be recreated using a surprisingly simple technique of layering a series of pointed leaves.

Begin with three pointed leafy shapes.
Add a few dry dead leaves drooping down against the ground.
Layer more pointy leaves, making sure to follow a general pattern of some sticking up and others sticking out to the sides.
Add central lines down the middle of each oval shape.

Bunch Grasses

Grass may seem like a tangled mess, but don’t worry! These grasses are fun and easy to draw. With a few basic strokes, you can capture the essence of these landscape staples and they can be used in many ways in a variety of landscapes. Vertical dashes are the building blocks you need to create lush meadows and grassy hills in your drawings.

Experiment with different sizes or amounts of vertical dashes that sprout from a central point or area on the ground.

Now, Let’s Draw the Scene

Start with some sideways V shapes on each side of the frame that are slightly level to each other. Draw two parallel vertical lines spaced apart in the center above those Vs, leaving a good amount of space between them.
Turn the V shapes into flat tops by adding some jagged cliff lines down from their points and another layer of flat tops below. Draw small curved slopes on the bottom of each parallel line. Add two reference dots in between the parallel lines at the top and bottom.
Using the dots, add wiggles that connect the slopes at the bottom and the top of the parallel lines, creating a pointed peak. Connect your mesas at the bottom with a curve in the center and add a few dashes down the flat tops.
Begin adding rocky texture with a variety of vertical lines up and down the central mesa, concentrating them on the right side. Add cliff faces by drawing lines on the bottom of the mesa that trail outward. Draw horizontal and vertical dashes to create shading under the flat tops.
Build more grandeur into your giant mesa by creating similar shapes on each side and lines trailing down the sides. Draw more of those vein-like lines on the bottom of your mesa.
Add distant mesas and get creative with their shapes; you can even add precariously balanced rocks on top.
Shade the right sides of these distant rocky shapes and add some details. Then draw horizontal striations along the top and bottom of your mesa, following the shape of the cliff face. Add some curving dashes to the foreground to indicate where the mesas connect to the desert ground.
Draw in desert shrubs in the foreground and on the mesa tops. Try a variety of Desert Chaparral, Spiny Succulents and Bunch Grasses in different sizes and shapes.

Add a few Juniper Trees and Rocks in the fore and middle ground.
Add even more juniper trees in the middle ground with varying sizes of scribbly triangles and dashes that get tinier on the sides of the frame. Draw small lines throughout the ground that follow the natural curves of the landscape. As always, keep them smaller in the distance to create more depth.
Add a small sun in the sky and surround it with parentheses that radiate out around it to create a scorching effect.