Almost Autumn: Drawing the Danish Landscape in Late Summer

It's still green, mostly, but not the same green as July. By early September, the Danish landscape has begun to change before autumn has properly arrived. Fields have turned yellow and ochre, the grass is duller, and the light disappears a little earlier each evening. It's one of my favourite times of year to draw.

Pressed summer flowers kept as color and drawing reference in my Copenhagen studio.

I tend to notice color first. The combinations are less obvious than they are in midsummer: dusty greens against harvested fields, dark berries, faded flowers and the occasional patch of blue that has somehow survived into September. I keep all sorts of visual references around the studio. Old photographs and books sit alongside sketches, scraps of paper and things I've picked up outside. I recently opened a drawer and found several dried flowers I'd pressed between the pages of a book months earlier and then completely forgotten about.

They aren't particularly scientific references. I'm more interested in the shape of a stem, the spacing of leaves, or an unexpected combination of colors than recording a plant exactly.

Drawing the End of Summer

Late summer also changes the way I think about landscapes.

A scene that might have been predominantly green a month earlier begins to break into different colors. Wheat and dry grass introduce warmer tones; shadows become cooler; trees stop reading as a single mass of green.

I work mainly in colored pencil, sometimes with gouache and Procreate, and landscapes are particularly suited to the gradual way those materials build. I can layer several greens into a field, introduce warmer colors underneath them, or change the weight of a tree line without having to decide everything at the beginning.

Late-summer Danish landscape illustration in colored pencil by Liv Hansen.

Much of my work draws on places in Denmark, although I rarely reproduce a landscape exactly. I might keep the shape of a path from one location, borrow a group of trees from another and alter the season or architecture entirely.

I'm interested in making somewhere feel recognisable without necessarily being identifiable.

September in Denmark

There is a short period around the beginning of September when summer hasn't quite gone, but autumn is already visible.

You can still eat outside on the right evening. The trees are mostly green. But the light has changed, and certain colors suddenly belong to the season in a way they didn't two weeks earlier.

I inevitably start reaching for ochre, brown, dark berry red and the more muted greens in my pencil box.

A few weeks later the landscape will look entirely different.

For now, I'm drawing the bit in between.

Further Reading

Vintage-Inspired Danish Illustrations: Scenes from Denmark

Danish Landscapes in Illustration

Vintage Design in Copenhagen

Scandinavian Illustration Portfolio