Hatching is an easy way to add texture, depth, and dark-and-light to your landscape design drawing.  Here is a hatching alphabet of different kinds of lines.


In this drawing exercise, pick out one or two of the alphabets, and use it to fill up the plants.  Not all full of lines, not uniformly, not all the same kind of density.  Stretch em out, speckle them, throw them here and there.  Imagine the tree is singing on a fall morning.  Crisp breezes and blue skies, a  few wispy clouds.  Or, perhaps an hour before nightfall.  Swallows are hunting and leaves are quivering.  Use your lines to show feeling and movement.  Dynamic natural tension.


It helps to observe trees in nature, and grab a few leaves or branches.  Get to know them by touch and smell.  Yes every tree is different.  Do not imagine that all trees are simply round cylinders or cones!  Nature is not flat and perfect like a make up job or a sheet of copper!  She is full of ins and outs, dents and spirals, billowing masses and sharp holes.  This is important to convey.  And it is sometimes difficult if you are not used to such surfaces.  Observe them and fall in love with them.


Try using a hatching alphabet that is not your first choice and play with it.  Drawing is supposed to be fun and free, not forced and constricting.  Theres always an unexpected surprise around the next corner.  Watch for it, and keep drawing until you think you are almost there.  Stop before you go too far and ruin the whole picture…



Oh no you messed it all up.  Go easy, what is left undrawn and blank is as important as the lines themselves.  Find a balance.  It is ok.  Drawing is infinite!  Heres a few more exercises.  If a garden is truly a paradise and sometimes an extension of the home’s interior, why are so many fences unfinished?  That is, why are we staring at lumber frames and posts?  How about finishing the fence walls with some art, mosaics, mirrors, and frames?  Give it a shot…


And a pot of plants?



Lastly, go inside of a tree.  Either climb it, or transfer your minds eye into the tree itself.  Theres branches.  Some are tight against the trunk, others flow bendy style out to the side, or arch like caverns.  Theres fat bottle like trunks, and skinny pole trunks full of side arms.  For this exercise, draw just the branches.  Yes, every tree has a certain character and disposition.  In part, it is formed by how it is structured in relation to the sun.  Wonderful canopy of leaves.   Observation is the key, keep your eyes open for our green friends!