Reddit reviews Drawing Scenery: Landscapes and Seascapes

In the meantime, draw everything. Everything. EVERYTHING.

Keep a sketch book with you always! Draw people waiting for the bus, cars parked outside, city blocks, landscapes, trees, ideas, concepts, doodles, nonsense.

Take pictures of things and use them for reference. Constantly! Can't figure out how an arm looks like in a certain pose, get someone to pose the same way and take a shot with your phone. Its not "cheating" and most artists worth their salt will stare at you like you're insane if you told them to do a large scale project with no live or photo references.

Go to figure drawing meetups. There's usually some at art schools or in any big city. You will be terrible at first but drawing people is a good way to train your eye.

Copy your favorite artist. Not just draw from, but try to copy a whole piece of art, from start to finish, line for line, as closely as possible. Do this a lot! It will help you understand why they put this thing there, and put that thing here, and drew that thing like this.

Its the same reason musicians practice other people's work before they start composing their own!

Figure out who their influence are, and do the same thing with them.

If you're looking for books to get you started, here are some good ones.

As a complete beginner myself, I very much enjoy Jack Hamm's Drawing Scenery: Landscapes and Seascapes. It really spends more time explaining how certain effects are accomplished, in more detail than most art instruction books do.

But, really, just draw, draw, draw.

I'm curious too, I ordered this because it was so cheap(43 cents for a used copy) and had good reviews but it hasn't come in yet.

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0399508066/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Try the link below.

https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Scenery-Landscapes-Jack-Hamm/dp/0399508066

awesome! It's a great resource. I should read it again, for a while I was reading it like once a year or so. This is another good one for composition https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Scenery-Landscapes-Jack-Hamm/dp/0399508066

Jack Hamm's 'Drawing Scenery: Landscapes and Seascapes'.

http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Scenery-Landscapes-Jack-Hamm/dp/0399508066

This is a cheap book with a lot of really good information on drawing landscapes. I recommend it.

If you're interested in a book to suppliment your studies I recommend [Jack Hamm's landscape book] (http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Scenery-Landscapes-Jack-Hamm/dp/0399508066)

The art book market is very limited when it comes to composition and although dated, this book is among the top of the heap.

yupp! grab this book by Jack Hamm about landscapes and drawing scenery. it has everything from trees to rocks to clouds and composition etc. its an awesome book and just practice :)

First you must realize that whatever camera you buy now, will 99.9% not be the last camera you buy. Your wants and needs WILL change as you take more pictures. ANY camera(P&S, DSLR, rangefinder, etc) will work. Go and take pictures. Post pictures in websites that revolve around photography and ask for critique. People will help you with composition and model posing(if you're into portraiture). Stay away from sites whose url or homepage revolve around cameras(ie dpreview.com).

Try to ask yourself "What am I taking a picture of?" Go to interesting places and find things you want to take pictures of. Again try to ask yourself "Why do I want to take a picture"? Take pictures at sun up and sun down. Midday pictures are technically difficult to pull off whereas EVERYTHING looks nice during dawn and dusk.

For the technical side of things, go over your pictures and find out what you didn't like about them. Is it the color? Did the camera take too long to focus? Did the you or the camera just not set up fast enough tho catch the subject moving around? Is it the picture too dark? Did you get the subject in the frame perfect but feel that the background is too busy and detracts? Learning how to fix these problems will get you acquainted with the basic controls of any camera.

I'm pretty sure people didn't invent a hammer and then go around looking for nails to bang. Someone probably realized attaching a stick to a rock did a better job at jamming things into other things than just using a rock. Why then worry yourself about things like "3D matrix metering" or "1/500s flash sync" or "1:1 reproduction" ratio if said things solve problems you haven't seen yet?

Read up on composition and color from painting/drawing websites/books. Too many photo sites focus on technical aspects and camera features rather than the analyzing the resultant photo. I learned more about composition from this book than any photo website.

Finally, try to get advice from people whose pictures you like. Here are a few pictures I've taken so you can judge whether or not to take my advice!