Clouds

2/26/17 colored pencil, smooth Bristol (photo source)

While I was playing on the beach last week, I missed a colored pencil class and got behind on homework from the previous week, which was depicting clouds.

As amorphous as clouds may seem, it’s still tempting to draw their rough contours to get a handle on them, but Suzanne warned against that. Attempting to draw them with a contour line, she said, would undoubtedly lead to the scallop-edged clouds of cartoons and our kindergarten drawings. Fighting that temptation, I did my best to shape them by coloring the shadows and negative spaces around them instead of the clouds themselves. I didn’t try to emulate the source photo exactly, but I attempted to evoke as much of its cloudiness as possible.

I probably say this about every class exercise, but I think clouds were the most challenging of all! I do wish I had done the assignment before going to Cannon Beach, though, because I might have been better prepared to sketch the clouds from life as they continually changed in the sky around Haystack Rock.