it's only paper...

another wet and gloomy week, lots of inside time

I'm continuing with the landscape work, this time working with space, line, colour and finally "motive"

motive is where you take what you learned from your explorations of all the other design elements and do a more resolved drawing

I have done at least eight motive drawings, probably nine

several were ripped up and tossed right on completion but I kept going and each day I said I was done, would live with what I had but then the next morning I would decide to try "just one more" 

always thinking about how to stop over-thinking it

and in that, it's no bloody wonder I've been struggling - always the thinking

anyway, here are a few that didn't end up in the bin - each has an area I really like but try as I might I couldn't bring it all together in one

below is one of the early versions: the two farthest mountain shapes are ok and I like the stone fence well enough but the in-between parts are awful

this next one - the sky, and farthest three mountain shapes are good but the three foreground shapes are not

in this next one, I was ok with everything but the last three shapes, the sky and two lighter mountains

the one I did after that had a pretty decent first three shapes - stone fence, meadow and first hillsides of trees but the rest was really bad so I tore off the parts I didn't like and then laid that foreground on the drawings where I liked what was happening in the background

below it is laid on what is the first image in this post

next I laid it on the second version

I liked that the best and so glued them together, happy that I was done

this morning I decided I needed one last try

I did two - the first was torn up pretty quickly

the second is not bad - the stone fence is getting closer to what I was wanting, though it is rather cubist... 

 I was using tinted charcoal pans and that isn't an easy medium to work with... still, it shows progress

The trees are not at all abstract but at this point I don't care - the pieced version takes care of that 

having done this over and over again I have realized that I am not yet close to working in abstract but I am feeling like there are glimmers of expression in these, not overall, but certainly in areas

there are places where I wasn't hung up on trying to make it look like what it is but I did come to realise the fence and the trees were the areas that I kept automatically moving to realism, or at least, strongly representational

Anita stresses in the course not to think of things as what they are - not a fence, just a shape with a certain kind of texture

the best part was that after drawing the pencil lines for the landscape shapes over and over again, by the time I got to the motive drawings I didn't need to look at my reference photo at all and as I got to about the 3rd or 4th of the final versions I wasn't looking at the photo at all

 and that was a breakthrough all by itself