New drawing-Young trees

I was reviewing the digital photos I took Christmas Day evening while driving home from my parents'. This photo caught my eye for further consideration.

There are two possible drawings from this photo. The large tree and grain bin on the right and the cluster of young trees on the left.

I decided to concentrated on the cluster of trees. The evening light, snow and and the appearance of the trees huddling together says cold!

After cropping and removing the unwanted stuff in the sky, I arranged the trees into a format that made a pleasing composition.

Then I printed out the picture and at the drawing board, did test colors in watercolor for the background and pencil colors for the trees. I don't try for a perfect color match with the photo since the colors don't always match with the screen and some experimentation with color can increase the effect desired anyway.

While doing this it occurred to me to try out a crescent moon. I drew one in on the photo and thought it would work. For better accuracy, I went to Flickr and found an evening crescent moon as my model.

For another picture printout I overlaid a handy grid object for scaling up when I did my pencil underdrawing on lightweight white paper.