Using a viewfinder undoubtedly helps in selecting a study when there is so much landscape to choose from before your eyes. However whilst country landscapes often present the ideal composition of foreground, middle ground and background I still found concentrating on simple shapes could be difficult. I live in a lovely area of countryside, not too far from Constable country, and feel that I could stop almost anywhere and find a lovely view. Historic buildings, riverbanks, lots of trees and fields with hedgerows are all within a stone's throw. Also, the skies around me are large and often beautiful in their colour and shapes as shown in many paintings by John Constable.
Cloud shapes constantly change and so a degree of memory is useful to sketch them. The perspective means that they get smaller as they get further away but sometimes it seemed hard to observe this if they were moving particularly quickly. I read that clouds should look as though they are in front of the sky so the tone of the sky should still come through. Also lots of tiny clouds can end up looking a mess so it's probably best to keep things simple especially if the foreground/middle ground is busy.
To create a sense of distance in the sketches I used more detail in the foreground, gradually made things smaller as they got further away and varied the tone. I made some notes on light direction such as the side of a house being in shade whilst the front was brighter and tried to put tonal differences in trees although not successfully.
Helpful additional preliminary work would have been more detailed sketches and coloured sketches as often I found myself walking back to the site of my sketch for further information more than once.
I decided to choose this scene for my larger A3 study. The reason I chose this is because this unit of work deals with perspective of various kinds and I thought the style would add linear perspective whilst the field added the aerial perspective. I wanted to make the tree on the horizon the focal point and wondered whether I could make the vanishing point of the style as well as the public footpath sign meet there at the tree. The foreground was more detailed and I tried to use warmer colours than in the background. When I was putting the colour onto the field for aerial perspective I was doubtful of my ability to do it correctly. This was because I knew that the more difference in colour the further the horizon would look. I hoped I did it properly so that the tree is in scale. It was only after completing this drawing that I realised the brief was to include a middle ground. The foliage behind the sign acts as a kind of middle ground I hope and in reality this should have been light against dark but I was unsure how to achieve this with coloured pencils and such small stalks. In reality the scene was much more drab in keeping with a miserable day so the zingy colours in this are not at all in keeping but again I'm not sure yet how to create contrast in the foreground greens without using bright colours. I have read several books on colour theory but need a lot more practice.
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