View of Nepi

Terrain as long contour

Nepi, around 1826: a walled town along the top of a tufa cliff, with the whole lower two-thirds of the sheet given to the broken ground below it. Where Marino is about placing a town, Nepi is about describing a hillside with contour alone: long lines that follow the fall of the land, a few short strokes for the rock faces, and the town as a thin band of verticals along the skyline.

Master: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Difficulty
Time: about 2 h
You draw with: 2H and H graphite

Sighting angles Envelope, masses, detail The receding ground Line weight Negative shapes

Why this one

It isolates the hardest skill in landscape line drawing: making ground recede with contour lines and no tone.
The town is a skyline problem, the cliff is a plane problem, and the two meet on one line.
It shows how the young Corot used a change of line direction to turn a form.

From your kit

The whole kit →

1Grafwood 2H, H 2H, H for layout and line. Long points from the Blackwing on everything up to B.
2Kneaded eraser and the Mono Zero press-and-lift corrections only; the Mono Zero for a single sharp light.
3Alpha sketchbook 9 x 6 draw at the book's size and keep the proportions; date the page.

In general, this study asks for

Drawing pad or smooth cartridge
2H and H with long points
HB for accents
Kneaded eraser
Sandpaper block

Watch first

All videos →

Sighting angles with a pencil against level and plumb.
YouTube

Measuring with a pencil in drawing, part 1Drawing Fundamentals · Unit-counting on a real subject.

Architectural pencil drawing tutorialMinty Sainsbury · Structure first, then tone, on a real stone building. The method of the Architecture studies in a modern hand.

The plan

4 stages · ~90 min

1
Find the one line
10 min
The whole drawing hangs from the line where town meets cliff. Sight its angle and its height on the sheet (about a third down). Draw it first, long, from the shoulder, in one pass.
Checklist0 / 1
- The skyline is one long line, sighted and placed
2
The town as a band
25 min
Along that line, the town: short verticals for walls and towers, a few roof slopes, the whole band thinner than you think. Measure the tallest tower against the band's length.
Checklist0 / 1
- The town is a thin band; the tallest tower was measured
3
The ground, by direction
45 min
With the H, lay the terrain in long contour lines that follow the slope. Where a rock face turns, let the strokes change direction rather than get darker. Keep pressure constant. The nearest ground gets the longest, most widely spaced lines.
FigureThe ground recedes. Texture near, calm far: here it is done with line spacing.
Checklist0 / 2
- Ground is described by line direction, not by tone
- Lines are further apart nearer the viewer
4
Audit
10 min
Squint at both. Does the ground read as falling away? If it reads as a flat pattern, your lines are too even. Thin them in the distance.
Checklist0 / 2
- Squinted: the ground recedes
- Dated and boxed

What it should look like

A thin skyline town over a hillside of long lines that visibly falls toward you.

Where it goes wrong

The hillside reads as a flat net of hatching. Lines evenly spaced and all the same length. Longer, sparser lines near; shorter, finer lines far. Let direction change at each turn of the rock.