Breugel‘s Winter landscape with skaters and bird trap 1505; Monet‘s Grand Canal, Venice 1908; and Stuppin‘s Catskill Moon 2013. Three landscape artists whose images caught my eye when I was trawling for examples of the genre. I already knew of Breugel and Monet but hadn’t come across Stuppin before and actually thought it was one of our local artists, Sarah Duffield who uses very bright and largely unrealistic colours for her work.  I was driven to have a go myself on the black sugar paper I’d pasted into my sketchbook, just to see what would happen.

These are Faber-Castell pencils and with some burnishing using Derwent burnisher/blender pencils although I can’t quite see what they did. Actually, seeing any of it was quite difficult as the pencils aren’t very bright, and getting a photo without the camera ‘correcting’ towards grey the black paper was also problematic. Another job for Paint Shop Pro! [it wasn’t].

Slightly out of order is the charcoal sketch of Tin Pots Hill I did first.

Tin Pots hill (latterly Piggy Hill, Pig Pong Hill and variations after a pig farm was established on the top.) Conte – very easy to make sweeps and big shapes and to prevent too much attention to detail. Page was coincidentally pre-prepped with a gesso/matte medium mix. I like to make myself use whatever’s next in the sketchbook.