the forbidden path into the wood

following on from the post earlier this week, I did indeed work on one of those images.

firstly I loved the big arching trees on this one, so a charcoal drawing ensued –

standard A3 thick rough textured cartridge paper, I love this for charcoal. but this does not give me the view into the wood

that this photo does,

so I worked longer on this drawing (using a thick stick of charcoal which very excitingly gives much deeper darker tones – only four of these to a box, but they give much more flexibility than the thinner charcoal)

you might be startled at this green ground I worked on which meant to get greys I am using a violet-tinged white.

then I tried to ignore the photo and just work from the drawing

but I remembered how dark and interesting the foreground tree is in that photo (taken with hipstamatic) and layered pure ultramarine on and around it, and then ultramarine mixed with alazarin crimson which over the other layers gives a purplish black.

beginning to come together

as far as I got on Monday, and the last half hour really the artificial light made it quite difficult, but I was pleased with the light opening which has to have quite a lot of subtle stuff going on around it and through it and in the space beyond. and the main wood/trees seemed be working, but the sky needed more paint on it and I wanted to make that foreground tree a wee bit more subtle. and the right foreground is very sketchy.

bringing some of the pale green from the sky around the branches helped and then I got my complementary colour sense out and went over a lot of that strong blue with hit and miss scraped on-scraped off mauves

I knocked back a bit of branchy stuff from pale grey to soft brown

separated the foreground dark vegetation from the edge of the wood with some umber-ish paint

and had to stop myself fiddling with things too much, leaving that sketchy business of the puddles and the track pretty much as it was.

so here it is finished. and it has given me the impetus to try to do something from these photos next

this lovely beech tree

or maybe the stream in the wood

these photos don’t have the quality of light and brilliance that the hipstamatic ones do, so I will either have to use my own resources

or go for a walk on a day with good light and take some more.

 

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