Tag Archives: landscape

Creating a Landscape Illustration for Children’s Books – The international Space School – Redesign

Following on from last videos version of my fantasy landscape for the International Space school in my upcoming books “GENERATION MOON” this is a completely revised design.

I went right back to my initial vision and simplified it, having decided that I could use a big, wide landscape on the title page that would provide the setting for the majority of the book right from the start. Also, there might not be a suitable double page to get it all in later on. Two birds with one stone.

I am much happier with this now, and can get on with the cover design now – see the next post!

How to draw a 3d landscape from a 2d plan

Carol Deml asked me how to draw a 3d landscape from a 2 d garden plan. So many people have asked me about landscapes in the backgrounds of drawing that I thought it was about time a made a video about it.

I am very spatially aware, so most of this comes to me without thinking. I can look at a floor plan and do a sketch for you, but not everyone can.

The way to do it is by making a floor plan and then transposing it to a 3d perspective plan and work it out from there.

If you are still confused, you need to watch my free everyone can draw course here 

I appreciate this might be a bit confusing, so let me know if and where you are having trouble and I’ll see if I can improve or refine the idea for you.

You can download a Hi res scan pdf of the images on my pattern page 

Scowles – Walking with my camera


After a couple of days away, a long drive back and then a morning of re-booking flights with a clogged up brain, it was great to get out for a walk this afternoon. There is a vast quarry up the road from me, where they are digging out stone for building and paving and the like.

All around the quarry are scowles – left over slag from previous workings – which get taken over by nature, making the distinctive landscape of the Forest of Dean.

In the photographs, you should be able to see how the Quarry are now bulldozing their slag up against the old scowles. In places it looks like a glacier of rock pouring into the spaces in between. I noticed a cardboard box on a tree stump below one of these piles of terminal moraine. I thought it may have a warning not to come too close writing on it, but no, it was an airgun target! Pop bottles, strewn around, evidence of kids doing a bit of target practice.

It won’t take long for the raw, bare scree to get colonised by lichen and moss, then covered in leaves, which will rot and provide compost for the trees and plants that will eventually turn this industrial eyesore into a walker’s tourist heaven, another scowle, another piece of classic forest landscape.