Some winter drawings

The weekly drawing/paintings sessions are about to come to a close over the next couple of weeks and I have begun to bring home some of the drawings that I did over the past few weeks.
If you remember, I've been doing all these winter frozen hazy landscape sketches in late December, and been working them up both in mixed media drawings and oil paintings.

• For photos, see this post

• For sketches, see this post

So, here's the first drawing/mixed media lot: two scenes worked on paper - the paper shines through and in fact provides the dominante hue. In addition, I've used some acrylic paint - parchment, grey, cerulean blue (I think) and some raw umber. The paint is worked with knifes, scratched and reworked, sponges and brushes. The lines are acrylic inks, in sepia, grey and royal blue (which is thalo blue).

Fields in December #1,
Mixed media on paper, 45x59cm

The process wasn't that straight - I kept working over it again - mainly to get some depth and texture into the woodlands, but also to define - move forward/backward - different masses.

Besides the winter mood, I was keen on developing a range of marks for the trees, in forground, further away or just at the horizon line. Here, varying hue, value and lines took some time. In the end, I faded quite a few of the very linear trees with gouache/acrylic washes - white and cerulean to make them less dominant.

Fields in December #2,
Mixed media on paper, 45x59cm

I like how both of them work together, yet in terms of composition, complexity work very differently - and to see that the simpler one (#2) actually works compositionally.

What I was somewhat surprised of was just the extent to which my winter theme carried with it moody, overcast skies and bleak emptiness - far more than I intended, in fact. And I can show how I used the limited palette (cobalt blue, raw siena, lemon yellow and red earth) for the oil paintings in another set of drawings too, to moderate and temper that freeze. - That's for the next post.

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