Light, tone, colour

As an artist, I have been trying to express myself through line, tone and colour.  In a similar way, the Pope is a Catholic and bears are ardently exploring the fundamental nature of their being by crapping in the woods.

Talking of woods, I walked on Saturday for several hours around a small copse, part of the nature reserve, which appears is visited rarely by birders (or by bears exploring their spirituality).  I can draw undisturbed.  Buzzards were roosting in the northern edge and periodically sweeping out across a recently cut field and back up over the trees, voicing their decrescendo cries.

On both the last two weekends, at one particular point, I could hear above me in the high foliage a duet, each a sequence of sharp calls of slightly over a quarter note in each of four or five bars.  Then a rest before a repeat sequence.   These moved through the canopy but only once did I glimpse a brown barred body.  The closest I can come to identifying these is as sparrowhawks.  This is based on the RSPB website, though many other recordings show sparrowhawks to make a more rapid staccato sound.

The picture above was an exercise to get myself drawing.  This comprised a quick pen sketch in fast ink then watercolour over this.  I stopped myself short of obscuring all the white paper.

This was the second sketch of the same composition, with photos on site of its first steps shown below.  Watercolour was spread on wet then lifted with damp tissue.  I drew into this in a mixture of paint and conte crayon.  The most essential colour is the pink which sits between and behind the greens and yellows.

 

This last was intended simply as a tonal study of the sunlight slanting down onto the trunk and leaves, in charcoal and white on warm-grey paper.  However, I found it hard to resist overlaying this in the greens and browns, thus losing the point of the exercise.