Quilt Barn Pencil Drawing

Hello, another week has gone by, and I wonder where the time has gone. This last week, my son Colton was home on leave from the Air Force. It was great to see him because with COVID-19 it has been around 20 months since the last time we were together. Anyway, while he was home, we were able to attend the replay of a wedding of a close family friend and get a camping trip in that included a visit to Gettysburg Pennsylvania. With all of that and returning to work on Thursday and Friday, I was surprised that I got this week’s drawing finished in time to get a blog post written.

This week’s drawing is one I have planning for a little while. I love the ocean and the sounds of the waves crashing into the shore. There is raw power in the ocean that nothing on earth can match or stop. Then add a light house, which represents a beacon of hope and safety, and you get a balance between extremes. For this week’s drawing I wanted to show powerful waves crashing into the shore with a lighthouse above guiding any ships away from the dangerous rocks and into safe harbor.

Reference for Drawing

To start this drawing, I first created a layout in Adobe Photoshop to use as a reference. To make the reference, I used several pencil drawings I found around the web to get the elements that I wanted. Then cropped them together into a single image that I could use to build my drawing from. At the end of this blog, I will show my reference and my finished drawing together so you can see how they compare. I also want to point out that the reference is just that, something to use as a guide. Not to copy exactly.

In starting this drawing, I used the same technique that I used last week in the Fairy Tree. Using a makeup sponge, I covered the paper with graphic powder focusing on the areas that I wanted to be darker. Also, I focused on the direction that I was spreading the graphic powder. In the sky, I used more circular strokes to get the feel of clouds. For the foreground water, I used a horizontal stroke to represent the water and waves. Then I used more of a tight vertical stroke to indicate the large rock on the left.

Once I had the basic shapes in and the initial values that I wanted, I started with my erasers to draw in the details. First, I used a stick eraser and placed the lighthouse on top of the rock. Then using a charcoal pencil, I added the details that included the top dome and the dark line just under the light. I also added two small dark vertical lines to represent windows. Next, using a kneadable eraser, I added the glow coming from the lighthouse to represent the light cutting through the storm clouds.

Moving down the left side of the paper using a stick eraser, I started drawing the large rock that the lighthouse sits on. Then, using the kneadable eraser, I began to create the wave crashing into the rock. At that point, I realized that my perspective was off between the wave crashing into the rock and the size of the lighthouse. To fix that issue, I decided to add another rock into the foreground for the wave to crash against. This seemed to help and it added a little more depth to the drawing.

Now that the left side of the drawing was roughed in, I started to draw the details of the waves and the rough sea in the mid-ground. To accomplish this, I used a kneadable eraser and an old dirty blending stump. Going back and forth between using a horizontal curved strokes to get the feeling of waves. About this time, I noticed on the center right side of the paper what could be a cliff face in the distance. I did not plan that but decided build upon it to add more depth to the drawing. This is what Bob Ross would call one of those “Happy Accidents”.

Anyway, after getting the water the way I wanted it and the background cliff finished, I worked on the details of the foreground wave and shoreline. In working on these details, the large rocks did not look right to me. They were too bright with the dark sky and ocean. To fix that, I took a 2B charcoal pencils and darken them and added more details. I also added a rock on the right side for the waves to crash into. Finally, I added more details to the waves and water in the foreground going between the stick and kneadable eraser, plus using an old blending stump to soften everything.

Now if you compare my finished drawing to the reference I created, you will see some similar items and a lot of differences. Again, my goal was not to exactly copy the reference. The lighthouse is not as high up on the left side and I also left out he grass in the foreground. My reference was just that, a guide to give me an idea on a direction to go if I got lost part way though the drawing. My main goal was to experiment with drawing a dark sky and waves to see if using graphic powder and erasers would be a good method of drawing them.

If you have any comments, I would love to hear from you. Please leave a comment. Have a good week.

Reference is on top and finished drawing is on the bottom.