Landscape colouring page

Hills, a winding river, a broad tree, a small house and a plain faceless sun in one open scene.

A river winds up the page from the bottom edge, widening towards the viewer and narrowing into the distance. Two rounded hills sit behind it. On the near left bank stands a small house with a pitched roof, a plain door and one window divided into four panes. On the right a broad tree grows from the bank, its trunk thick and forked and its crown drawn as three separate bumpy leaf clusters. Above, a plain sun disc with straight triangular rays hangs in the sky — completely empty inside, with no face, no eyes and no mouth — and three birds are drawn as bare double curves.

The character of this scene comes from one fact: the areas are enormous and there are only about eight of them. Sky, two hills, river, near bank, far bank, tree crown, house. A crayon can finish this page in a few minutes, and that is a real use of it rather than a shortcut.

The river is the shape that repays attention. It runs from the bottom edge to the middle distance and it narrows steadily, which is what makes the drawing look deep. Colouring it darker near the top and lighter towards the bottom reinforces that, and it is easier than it sounds because the shape is one continuous lane with no interruptions in it at all.

The tree's crown is drawn as three separate clusters rather than one mass, and that is a gift: three tones of green, one per cluster, makes a flat crown look rounded with no blending required. The trunk forks into two main limbs that run up into the crown, and following them with a slightly darker line makes the tree stand in front of the hill behind it rather than on top of it.

The house is the smallest object and the only one with straight lines. Its roof, its two visible walls, its door and its four window panes give six small closed shapes, and it is worth using a different colour on the roof from the walls — a house reads as a house mainly because its roof is a different material from everything under it.

The sun is a plain empty disc with straight rays around it, and there is no face in it. It is worth leaving the disc white or very pale, because it is the only bright thing in the sky and a filled sun on a filled sky loses the contrast entirely. The three birds are bare curves with nothing enclosed, so they cannot be filled; a pale wash across the sky behind them leaves them showing as white marks, which is the way to make them visible.

One plain point about the drawing is worth noticing while you work. The river is drawn wide at the bottom of the page and narrow at the top, and the hills behind it are drawn smaller than the tree in front — both of those are the same trick, which is that things farther away are drawn smaller. Colouring the far hills paler than the near bank uses the second half of the same idea, since distance also washes colour out, and the two together are what make a flat sheet look like a view.

Print at actual size on plain A4 paper. There is little here that a smaller print damages except the window panes and the birds, but this is a sheet worth having large because the areas are the point. If markers are the plan, load thicker card, since the sky and the river are two very large single fields. Pinned up whole it reads from across a room; there is nothing on it that cuts out usefully.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026621 words