Part 3 Project 3 Ex 2

Foreground, middle ground, background.

I changed the position of the pylons
in my drawing to try to get distance

The area I live in is quite flat and some might say uninteresting.  I might have said so myself until I started to do sketches and think about composition.  At first I was troubled because it was hard to find a focal point but I have realised that a focus can be anything not necessarily something really powerful like a building or a beautiful tree.

In this drawing the focus is the pylons which disappear into the distance and diminish in clarity.  In the foreground is a hedge which is covered in dead goose grass and a track that has been churned up by tractor tyres. In the mid ground is a ploughed  field and beyond the hedge a grassy field.  In the far distance the hills at the edge of the valley.

The image is developed from one of my 360 deg sketches but taken from a slightly different angle. I went back to do some checking on the pylons and look at the perspective more closely.   I took the photo above and worked from that but tried to incorporate the feel of my original sketch with the towering pylons.

I went to the site just before mid day and it was bright and very windy - I had a hard job to stand up. The sun shone on the pylons and cast a shadow from the near hedge.

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The image here is cropped simply because my scanner is A4.  In the original (A3) there is a large puddle in the immediate foreground that is only just evident on the left here.

Trent Valley Pylons

I used graphite pencils on cartridge paper.  My manual suggested I should try water soluble graphite but I haven't any at the moment. I used charcoal for the sky and smudged it vigorously.

I tried to capture the expansiveness and the bleakness of the scene and I think monochrome helped with this. I didn't want to draw images of hedges, trees, grass and so on but to represent them with suitable marks rather in the way that van Gogh did in my previous post. I also tried to use the rough paper to get texture and tone as Seurat did.  The ploughed field worked well in this respect. The detail below clearly shows how I managed to get the pencil to skip over the paper leaving white paper visible.

Trent Valley Pylons - ploughed field detail

This is the first drawing I've done where I've manipulated the scene to suit my purposes (I wanted the pylons to indicate distance).