Today I was putting some final touches to the Autumn Fairy drawing (I corrected the nose a bit, and made the face a bit less smooth, with more different colours and shades), and then I started drawing the door again. Bad idea. Although it’s a really pretty picture, I’m just not feeling interested while drawing it. Weird, because there are so many nice colours and textures to indulge in…
So I decided to draw “rough” today. I took out the pastel chalks I own, and decided to play with a perspective drawing. This is not a photograph, it’s just my imagination, but I tried to apply some of the things I learned while reading Pastel Pointers by Richard McKinley. He wrote about colours getting lighter and cooler when they are further away, and about guiding the eyes in a certain direction/pattern through shapes and “hard and soft” edges.
I started by just drawing the river, with curves, to create diagonal lines to follow with your eyes. In the front, I used some yellow, brown, orange and red (together with blue and purple), and gradually diminished the amount while drawing more to the back of the drawing. I added a soft sky where you cannot see the sun, but it is suggested by the colouring that the sun is somewhere on the left, perhaps behind the tree. First I was planning to add a forest around the river, but then I decided that the river would move toward a lake, to add even more distance.
This drawing was fun to make, as I got to use lots of colours, and didn’t get to be too precise (with the chalks that’s very hard, anyway). It’s more about the general idea. I found out that I still need to learn how to suggest grass (for example) without having to draw every single thing. The perspective is a bit “sudden”: you expect the lake to be further away. Still, it was a nice exercise, and it doesn’t look too bad.