Back to the drawing board

3 Trees at Quarry Hill is done and on the wall for evaluation. So far I am pleased with it. I added more dead leaves on the right side tree to balance the compostion some and left the woods in the background more open than the source photo showed. Let's hope I feel the same way in six months after I take it out of storage for review!


As a break from my larger, more elaborate drawings I did a series on 12" x 9" black Canson Mi-Tients. The first two shown here are done in Derwent White charcoal. Searching is based on an orginal photo of a nineteenth century marble sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.



Chinese Metal Horse



White Chinese Horse is done with a silver colored pencil. It looks white in the photo, in person by moving the paper around the silver gleams.




Painted Han Horse is done in Derwent Drawing pencils. They are quite opaque and cover the black paper well.

Winter Work

This past month I haven't been doing much drawing. I have a large watercolor and color pencil drawing in progress. I have also been doing matting and framing of my work, making a great effort in getting caught up with that. I have a dozen done so far, then ran out of matboard. While waiting for more matboard I worked on my drawing.

As is usual for my WC and CP drawings, the background washes simplify doing the sky and snow and the colors help set the mood: a clear, cold winter evening when the deer come out to feed. Three Trees at Quarry Hill, 17.75" x 24" Water color and Prismacolor and Faber-castell Polychromos color pencils on watercolor paper.

I forgot to post this drawing last time. This drawing spent quite some time in the planning stages. The inspiration was a herd of horses spending their winter in a bare yard and large shed for shelter. This pinto horse standing in front of the open shed door basking in the winter sunshine caught my eye. There were a lot of adjustments done around him to improve the composition. The window was moved and the foreground hay feeder was from another part of the yard. I also experimented with a tractor tire feeder that was there too, but decided I needed something in the foreground that could overlap the background. Pinto, 11" x 16" Derwent Drawing on tan Canson Mi-tientes.