During the week I was working on the exercise, I took my sketchbook with me and made drawings during office lunch break. I made one close-up drawing of a tree at the UN garden, and two drawings at Hammarskjöld Plaza on Farmer’s Market day, with the vendor’s huts in the background.

I think the drawings show all the difficulties I have with focusing on a subject and being concentrated long enough to make a meaningful drawing with some accuracy in depiction. Nevertheless, I think there’s some progress – firstly, in that I try to draw regularly despite feeling stressed and busy all the time, and secondly, I feel that the drawings are slightly improving, compared to what I did last year for the drawing course.

Drawing rocks

For this exercise, I chose the rock formations at Tarrytown lake as a subject. I had been drawing them on location earlier, and also taken some photos.

I selected one of the photos for this exercise. First I made a sketch using children’s crayons, size 28 x 38 cm. I’m quite satisfied with this drawing, because I achieved some degree of contrast and the shapes come out nicely. It took some time to draw because the crayons are very limited in the colour range, so I had to experiment a bit until the colours and tones began to work.

The second work was a watercolour painting, size 33 x 43 cm. I painted this over two evenings. I’m quite unsure about it. After the first session, it lacked contrast but was very light and fresh. In the second session, I added darker tones and tried to work out the shapes. I’m not very satisfied with how I painted the rocks and think the problem was that I was too tired in the evening to properly concentrate on the task. I painted fast which corresponded to the mood I was in. I wanted to paint the little rocks to the lower left side, but wasn’t able to capture the forms. At one point I stopped because I felt I could only spoil by overworking.

Then I made a drawing with Inktense coloured pencil in dark brownish green, on watercolour paper, in the same size. I tried to depict the shapes of the rocks more accurately and indeed it was much easier with a pencil than with a brush. I finished this drawing the next day and then went over it with a wash. I quite like the result because the shapes of the rocks are more accurate.

Then finally I decided to give it another try with watercolours . My intention was to make a simpler painting with less detail. I’m again unsure of the result. The little rocks to the lower left again did not work out and the shapes and shadow area of the large rocks don’t look quite right. It’s more the painting as a whole that seems to work nevertheless.

I found painting rocks very difficult and felt at a loss with my technical ability, or lack thereof. The course had exercises about mixing greens and analysing tonal values, but it doesn’t seem to fall into place when I try to paint something. Probably rocks in a landscape is a subject that is very complex, both analytically and technically. Despite feeling I’ve had insufficient practice, I’ll leave it at that and proceed to the next exercise, because I’m trying to keep up with the course schedule.