Week 23

 Landscape hunting

To choose what to draw I went on a walk to look for nice landscapes in my area, i wasnt able to do the piece onsite as it would get very busy in that area later on . I wanted to try a natural setting since I need to work on my foliage painting and drawing and this is a good chance to do that. I also wanted to have some animals in the scene such as ducks and birds.

Sketching 

  I sketched out a few of the images to further cement which one I wanted to use ,  after choosing which one I wanted I sketched it out onto a A3 page, i had to make sure the sketch lines were light and easy to erase since i would be erasing the majority so they won't show through the colours. I think the base sketch was good but I should have put more attention on the layers of foliage at the back to get a better idea of how it was structured as I ended up struggling with this later on, also I think that the perspective of the path was a but off which made it look steeper than it achually was so next time I should look again at the angles within the scene to properly measure them in relation to whats around it. I think I managed to get the shape of the lake well represented through minimal detail in the sketch which meant I had a solid base to go on whilst painting .

Final piece

Since I was using watercolours my main focus was getting good areas of colour to build upon with details and highlights. For example for the lake I started out with washes of colour to match the algae brown colour of the lake, to find the main colour I found blurring your eyes takes away detail and leaves slodges of main colour. Then I went over top with a variety of colours and smaller brushes to make the ripples in the lake, I found it quite hard to get this right because it always seemed to balance between water and long grass but I tried to fix this using more rounded shapes at the end since ripples are radiating ovals rather than flicks, this is a mistake I made early on and next time I will try and pay closer attention to the shapes of textures and reflections. Another thing i think could have been improved is the colouring of the path right its more saturated than the path in the reference . One successful part of the piece was the painting of the orange bush in the back which has a nice depth throughout because of the harsh shadows that frame the shape of the bush.

Revisoon