Mountain Pencil Drawing Honoring Bob Ross Part 2

Hello and welcome to part two of my blog posts of the mountain drawing that I started last week to honor Bob Ross. Overall it is not too bad, but I am not overly happy with the final result. Now, I can’t say the drawing was a failure, because I believe if you look at it you can tell that the subject is of a mountain in the background, forest in the middle ground and a waterfall in the foreground. At least that is what I hope people see. Anyway, I am going to take this week and talk about what went right and what did not in this drawing. I find I learn as much from drawings that did not go well as I do from ones that I call a success. Let’s get started.

Now, I think the main problem I ran into was not having a clear plan from the start. If you remember from last week’s blog, I ran into kind of a drawing block after completing the Barn Pencil Drawing for Deb Tucker. To get through that I just started drawing without a real goal in mind except to do something that resembled a Bob Ross painting. However, without a full plan for completing a drawing from beginning to end, problems can creep in. That’s not to say that problems will not happen in a well-planned drawing. Without a good direction in mind when you run into issues, they are harder to overcome. The reason is the direction you go. If you have it planned out, the plan can act as a guide for solving the problem. Without a plan, you are left guessing what to do. That is what happened to me in the foreground with the rocks.

When I started with the rocks in the foreground, I did not have a good idea in mind on how I wanted to draw them.  I bounced back and forth between a solid rock cliff or a lot of individual boulders. What happened was I started with a cliff face on the left. I did not like how the rock was developing, so I transitioned to boulders partway through. The problem was that I could not fix the rocks on the left without doing too much damage to the surface of the paper. So, I ended up with a mixture of the large solid rock on the left and the boulders in the center and on the right. It’s not awful, but not quite what I wanted to achieve. As Bob Ross would say, "you don't make mistakes, you have happy accidents". However, in drawing, I think you can actually make mistakes. 

Now, let’s talk about what went right, because there are a lot of areas that I was really happy with. To start, the sky and the mountains in the background went well. I had not really experimented that much with just laying down graphite powder on paper then using an eraser to do the drawing. I think the result was great and it was a lot of fun to do. Also, I think the forest in the center middle ground turned out well. I was able to get the impression of distance by keeping the trees lighter in value and did not add a lot of details. Combining these elements make the subject look further away. I also liked how the waterfall turned out. I am sure it could use some more details but overall, it represented what I wanted.

For a good part of this blog post, I have been very critical of my work. My wife, Tina tells me all the time that I judge my work too harshly, but that is how I can get better. I spend what many would consider way too much time just staring at my work and analyzing it. However, that is how I can pick out areas to work on in future drawings so hopefully each one will be better than the last. For this drawing, I am going to put it aside for a little while and come back and do it again later this summer or fall. I now have a good layout and know the areas I struggled with. I can practice and experiment with drawing rocks and hopefully my next attempt will be better than this one. It will be like the barn drawings I have done in the past. I have done barn drawing multiple time and each one gets a little better.

Thank you for visiting my blog and I hope everyone has a good week.