Mountains

2/9/17 colored pencil, smooth Bristol (work in progress; photo reference)

Suzanne Brooker has a systematic way of teaching landscape drawing. In the first class, we worked on the fundamentals of the three-dimensional form by focusing on a tree trunk in monochrome. The following week we used three colors to study a tree’s foliage. Last week the focus was on composition and perspective to show distance and foreground. Each class builds on the concepts learned previously, and we add more hues to our colored pencil palette.

This week the focus is on mountains. As usual, we’re paying particular attention to the way light and shadow describe the distant forms. After choosing an especially boring photo to work from last week, I made sure I picked a mountain photo with some visual impact. I’ve been working harder on getting darker darks with colored pencils, and last week’s image had only a small area of really dark trees, so the shadows in this photo seemed like a good opportunity to practice.  

Reference photo

It’s been raining cats and dogs almost continuously today, so I spent most of the morning on this exercise (taking frequent short breaks). I need to work on deepening some of the mid-values, and the sky needs more work, but I’m happy with the dark shadows I got. A little more work later this week, and I hope it’s done.