“Nature Girl” Ink Drawings — Incorporating Characters into Landscapes

An experiment comes together from spare hemp paper and a dream!

The three ink drawings I made! Keep scrolling to see them in detail.

I’ve always loved drawing landscapes; there’s something therapeutic about observing the organic shapes and moving your pen or brush in a leafy pattern.

And lately, I’ve been enjoying drawing portraits and characters, both cartoons and semi-realistic. There’s a satisfaction in capturing a resemblance and seeing lines come to life as a familiar face.

But the one type of drawing I never thought of doing was combining a character and a landscape. It just never occurred to me, and felt kind of incongruous. I couldn’t get the character and landscape to match in tone, so they’d feel like parts of the same picture.

Challenge accepted

As soon as I noticed that I’d been avoiding this type of art, I couldn’t wait to get better at it! I followed this advice from art YouTuber LavenderTowne: to learn new art skills by framing them in terms of the skill that you are already good at.

In her case, she enjoys and is good at drawing characters, so she imagines their homes as an extension of them. Drawing backgrounds was the hardest part for her until she started seeing them this way. (Overall, her…